


Two Colors, White and Gold

by Carelica



Series: The Pine Needle Tea Papers [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 1001 poetic uses of an SAS Arctic Survival Guide, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Comfort, Feelings in the Siberian Tundra, Healing Sex, Huddling For Warmth, Illustrated, M/M, Mystery, Playlist, Post-apocalyptic snowy Stucky, Recovery, Speculative fiction, Touch-Starved, Yearning, a forest of pining and also pines, all the blankets, all the soft things for touch-starved Bucky, all the tenderness, eerie spaces, wildly romantic intensity, wolf - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:15:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 36,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21749617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carelica/pseuds/Carelica
Summary: He’s here, he’s alive. His hand is on a tree.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: The Pine Needle Tea Papers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914091
Comments: 717
Kudos: 828
Collections: All of the Stucky, Hail Stucky, Stucky, Stucky Collection, Stucky Stories





	1. Rust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frostbitebakery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostbitebakery/gifts).



> Hi! I was **daphneblithe**. This fic was inspired by stunning art from [frostbitebakery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostbitebakery/pseuds/frostbitebakery), [@snoozebuttonfig](https://twitter.com/snoozebuttonfig) on twitter. <3 <3 It was such an honour to write for this art. I’ve made a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3nuCCH5UyHWP00xzPMgnmj?si=P_6pvY6oT7KOYQDB5Ul3Zg) and a [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dg32rRxIVZzypaTWDi1AW9d79j-Ry3D)! 
> 
> [Edit:] OMG the amazing [QUIETNIGHT has made a PODFIC!!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018629/chapters/55040413), and it’s absolutely breathtaking 😭😭❤️❤️! And Wow!!! The lovely Avadakedavra and Resurcat have [translated the fic into RUSSIAN!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26719321/chapters/65181484) As well as taking exquisite photographs of the real-life settings of the story, which I include as a final chapter! Breathtaking - my heart is so full!😭😭❤️❤️

* * *

Silence is the first thing.

The man emerges from gray sleep slowly, into cold. His throat is raw and his limbs feel heavy, distant, as if he’s been suspended long underwater. Eventually, with effort, he opens his eyes.

He’s strapped in the glass coffin, and through the yellowish cast he can see the usual cavern, the chamber, but … there’s nobody here. The man doesn’t know who he is or where he is, but he dimly realizes that this isn’t right. Something is missing. No whips, no boots, no barked order of _Soldat_. Time drips by, and all he can hear is his own breathing.

The other tubes are still empty. He saw the rest of them die in those after they went feral, saw switches flip and the tubes lose light, change color, turn to coffins. He's the last—and at that thought his drowsy melancholy starts to ebb. There’s no time for this. The handlers will come back, so he must get out, get out _now_. Breaking the straps is easy but the glass less so, and now he’s slamming himself against it, frenzied, intense, his dark hair obscuring his vision as he throws himself forward with all his desperate strength. Then he’s falling, crashing to the floor with the shards.

Stillness. He ignores his cuts and looks up.

The strips of emergency lighting can't reach the vaulted ceiling that stretches into darkness. _Cathedral._ The man remembers that word. A place where you pray, where you ask for mercy.

He doesn’t know his own name, but he knows he hasn’t had mercy for a long time.

* * *

The man is cold and hungry and a fear is starting to simmer in his chest, some deep terror that goes beyond either of those things: a terror of imminent light and pain and unbearable pressure in his skull. He’s half-walking, half-crawling through corridors of dim seaweed light, dust and darkness, thick and heavy black. He can see well in the dark, but he’s struggling. He has no boots, his feet are bare, and the concrete tears them. When he glances back, smudges of blood mark the floor.

Breathing is hard. His throat’s still raw from the … _gas_ , his memory supplies, a cruel fog. The air in the bunker is thick with moisture. Sometimes, when his hand scrapes the wall, he feels the soft, clammy give of fungus.

Some of the walls he passes must have been white once, but now they’re marred with red flakes of rust, dripping with condensation. It looks like blood. He keeps going, moving through the space by instinct. There’s still no sign or sound of anybody else, but he remembers boots and shouting and cold water. Pain and fear. Light.

There's none of that here now.

The cement hallways are chipped and shabby. Haven’t been maintained for a while, long enough to degrade. Marks on the walls emerge from the dark as his torch catches them—painted warnings, protocols. Symbols of nuclear risk, fading like cave paintings.

He’s been here a long time. He remembers the ink brighter on the walls, bustling, people moving through the space.

Sometimes there are holes in the floor as he passes, and once he nearly falls in. He catches himself in time, and glimpses the void beneath—a sucking, wet darkness. The smell of mold is nauseating. He keeps going.

At the next corner the walls and ceiling stretch into a kind of amphitheater, a vast hollow space around a single machine, brooding and silent. A Chair. Hulking and dark, a metal carapace, a cruel thing. It looks—dead. It’s a strange word to think, standing there alone in the empty dark. And it isn’t true. It’s not dead: pain runs singing through those wires, always ready to tear.

The man knows this, knows it intimately, and he backs away, panic rising. The room is blurring, he’s turning, he’s _running_ , he has to _get away_.

Darkness and cold and a jagged blur of light. His mind’s screaming, his body's screaming, he can’t escape it, he’s _never_ escaped it _._ Tripping, splashing into stagnant water, staggering, running, wild with terror and dread. No more blue light, no more electric torture. He’s a creature, fleeing, desperate for somewhere to hide, and he finds it.

He’s slipping, crashing down a chute, and finds himself in a narrower corridor. There are small rooms one each side, and now he’s inside one, there are bunks, bare of mattresses, but it feels like a refuge, a burrow, and the man climbs into one of them and shakes while the pressure builds in his head. Then the storm takes him.

* * *

_Bucky leans back and exhales, smiling._

_“It’s hardly luxury accommodations.” Monty’s English drawl is amused._

_Bucky's body is tight with laughter and his belly is warm. “Shut up, Monty.”_

_“He’s right. Is this the kind of hospitality we’re gonna offer?” Gabe’s voice is equally lazy. “Cap’s returning as a conquering hero, taking that base all by himself, needs something special to welcome him back.”_

_Bucky winks at Gabe. “Oh I dunno.” Leans back, takes another drink. “We’ve got beer and we’re warm and dry, what more do we need?”_

_Morita snorts. “Maybe less of the smell of sheep, pal.” Dernier and Gabe are giggling, and Dugan’s already blissfully passed out, his hat over his face._

_Bucky leans back on the bags of wool. He can’t stop smiling and a lightness twists warm in his chest. Someone’s coming back. He’ll walk in, and Bucky will see him. Hold him._

* * *

Consciousness seeps in cold and heavy. The man’s still huddled on the mattress, and he’s shaking convulsively, deep bone cold. A dream is clinging, though he can only remember fragments—something about safety and hope. He can't chase it, though, because hunger is now a gnawing pain.

He’s curled, fetal position, his hands in fists by his face, and when he opens his eyes he notices his right, flesh wrist looks oddly fragile. He pulls back, looks at his right arm, his torso, and sees he’s desperately thin. He doesn’t know how long he was out after his collapse, but it must have been days, maybe even a week. He desperately needs food, water. But—his body softens, eases—nobody’s found him. Nobody’s come.

He’s dizzy with the thought of it. Sits up, swings his feet over the edge of the bed, feels the floor under his soles.

He listens.

The bunker is still absolutely silent. The faint lighting is still there but the dust on the floor is undisturbed apart from the tracks from his own headlong entrance. He really is alone. They still haven’t come back.

He stands, sways. Food, he has to get food, then _go_. He can’t risk being locked back in the glass coffin as the light fades out and the years melt back into delirium.

He finds tins in a small steel galley kitchen. The faucet yields enough to quench his thirst, but after a while it grinds dry. There are pale blue tins of сгущёнка, condensed milk, green cans of морска́я капу́ста, pickled kelp, and he eats both cold from the tin. He’s shaking while he peels back the lids. Some are misshapen, swollen, and he remembers not to touch those. 

He remembers a lot. He can kill, can survive. He is thinking in two languages. He is operationally efficient. He doesn’t know who he is.

He huddles in the dark, and eats, lonely. The milk is sweet on his tongue, and the bunker is quiet around him.

* * *

The next passages are winding and wet, wide enough to fit military vehicles. The muddy tire tracks look long dried out. The corridors slope with a perceptible gradient and he keeps heading up, and after a while it feels less like a building, and more like … a machine, something metallic and intricate. Human bodies are cogs.

The next level is much darker, so power must have failed on some of the lighting strips. The man walks carefully, watching the floor. He glances down the adjacent corridors as he passes, and cool, damp air blows his hair.

* * *

Here, finally, are bodies.

Skeletons, to be exact. Three. Clothes and bone, flesh and tissue long gone, so they must have died six months ago, maybe longer.

The man kneels beside them, and wonders. He recognizes the Russian uniforms. Three officers--a captain and two lieutenants. Weird combination, you’d expect at least some grunts around as well.

The man wonders if one of these people tortured him. The thought comes with a flinching kind of pain, more fear than anger. The skeletons can’t tell him anything, so he leaves them.

He finds an area that might be officers’ quarters. Wider rooms, fewer bunks, and nearby, quartermaster supplies. He needs clothes. The black vest and leggings are cold and wet, still damp from the glass coffin, so he strips, shivering.

There's a science to this, and he remembers. First, the under-layer, drawstrings tight at wrist and neck and ankle. Then wool, rough but necessary, thick and belted. The next item is dark blue fabric, and as soon as his hand touches it, he stills. It’s soft.

He pulls his hand back and then, tentative, reaches back to touch it again. It’s fluffy. As he strokes it, an ache uncurls in his chest. His fingers are trembling. Can this be for him? Can he have this?

He picks it up. It’s a jacket, the hood thick and warm. He slides it on and at the first contact of the fabric his chest clenches around a wordless swell of grief and gratitude. He feels his lips quiver, but he can’t stop. The scarf is even gentler and he closes his eyes as it touches his cheek. Every part of him is trembling now.

He stands there, shaking, soft things on his skin and a storm in his heart.

He remembers a … covering, over his face. A hard black mask. It hurt, sometimes, but he was used to it. This is different. He pulls the scarf around his head, closes his eyes and turns his face into the gentleness. He pulls it up over his eyes and nose. His eyes are wet.

He stands there for a long time. He’s in the dark, but his body feels warmed from outside in. Nothing is touching him with cruelty.

[   
](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1105036204997861378)

[ ](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1105036204997861378)

He has to go. Next, it’s straps. He remembers them over him, belting him down, locking him in. No more like that, but some straps can be useful, and he loops on the thigh holsters, swings straps around his torso and waist and thighs. He can carry a lot. He knows he’s strong. The brief moment of confidence melts and his hands shake on the fastening. For a moment he loses his train of thought. Where is he?

Yes. He’s in the Arctic circle, near Oymyakon. He’s been here a long time. He knows that. He just—doesn’t know who he is.

Doesn’t matter. He knows he has to get out. He searches the rest of the floor, and finds the rest that he needs. Weapons. He remembers these, too, the COP 357 Derringer, the TEC-38, and slides those into the thigh holsters, the SIG-Sauer on the left. The Gerber knives go in their sheaths, and this Ka-Bar Becker BK2 hunting knife. And yes, here: the Lobaev SVLK-14S. He’s used it before, and it’s exceptional, a sniper rifle for ultra-long range. When he reaches for the gun it feels seamless, natural. He slings it over his back. Then he hesitates. Usually there would be people here, backup, people to hand him equipment or refill ammunition, but nobody’s here. He has to do this himself. So, slowly, he fastens spare bullets around his boots. Gloves, so crucial that he knots the threads to his straps. Snowshoes over boots.

Now survival gear. Right—here’s standard stuff. His missions usually had bespoke materiel, but he can work with this. Check it. Be systematic.

Gerber black center-drive multi-function tool, blades wicked and sharp. This too, he must lash to a strap—cannot risk losing it. There’s a flint and steel, a magnesium block, so fire-starting’s covered. Water purification tablets, first aid kit, steel wire-saw, paracord, survival polyethylene bag, two condoms for gun barrel protection and emergency water carry, tampons as backup firestarters, salt tablets, stainless steel thermos, a billy can. Charcoal beneath eyes to reduce snow glare. Goggles.

He holds the goggles gently, traces the shape of them with his flesh hand, but he isn’t really seeing them. He can feel himself frowning. He knows how to use this equipment, knows how to survive in these places, but he can’t remember _how_ he knows that …

_light through leaves, and the sound of water_

He blinks. The bunker’s dark around him.

He swallows. No time for this. He needs to get ready, needs to go, before they come back. A liquid-silva compass, though pretty useless this close to the polar North. An analogue watch, yeah, that will work for navigation. GPS would be great, though, and he needs maps. He needs to work out where he’s going. He may have spent years in a glass coffin and was deployed all over the world, but he was also used in Siberia, used often. He can operate in this terrain, and he knows where he is—even if not who.

He’ll head to Oymyakon, try to find out what’s going on. He needs intel. Chances are he’s going to have to head into the wilderness to evade capture. He doesn’t feel hopeful, but that doesn’t matter. He needs navigation tools. As he resumes his search, though, traces of that memory linger.

_light through leaves, and the sound of water_

* * *

He finds a small room with communications gear, a rusted filing cabinet, a battered wooden chair jammed under a desk. There are maps here, and he takes some; they’re high scale, covering a huge amount of east and central Siberia but with minimal detail. Still, he can follow rivers, once he decides where he’s going. Finally, here are radios. The batteries look fine, aren’t corroded or leaking, but the radio gets nothing but static. The man leans on the creaking chair, turns the dial slowly.

He’s patient, systematic, but there’s nothing. He tries the GPS, and gets no signal. The satellites are silent.

The man slumps back in the chair. Okay.

He can’t avoid thinking about this anymore.

The base is deserted. He’s never woken without a team of soldiers present, but it’s empty. The only people here died on site a long time ago, and the base looks neglected, un-maintained. Maybe they’ve forgotten where he is? But then--the satellites.

He stares at the radio. 

Maybe it’s not just the base.

An impossible thought is starting to creep in. Is he the only person left?

it can't be true—it's just coincidence. Still, in the silence and isolation below ground, the fanciful idea sets root. Hunched there, in the darkness beneath the ground, his mind fills with the space between planets. Delicate machines turning in the dark, with no humans below to hear them.

* * *

He emerges from the bunker and the brightness hits him like a blow. He covers his eyes with one arm, curves away from it, and the soft fabric of the hood and scarf are gentle barriers, protection. The cold bites into him but he knows cold, and he does not flinch. The light bleeding around the fabric gradually becomes more bearable and he drops his arm.

There’s a mess of rusted vehicles, metal scrap, near the base, but apart from that there is nothing but silence and ice as far as he can see.

He stares. His mind is wordless, shining.

He turns, scanning the horizon. No people. No signs of life, no vehicle tracks. Nothing but white snow and gray sky and a quiet so deep he hears it in his bones. He doesn’t know who he is yet, but he knows that he’s alone.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fervent thanks to genius betas @gracelesso and @743ish and @newsbypostcard, @jinlinli for the inspired brainstorming that made this fic happen, @defiler_wyrm for expertise on wolves, @@o0blepikha for expertise on Siberia, @hansbehart on everything 1930s Brooklyn from coal stoves to fabric designs, and the matchless @girlbookwrm, @743ish, @seapigeon, @layersofsilence for writing wisdom and glorious cheering. If you love Frostbitebakery’s stunning arts as much as I do, [please do feel free](https://twitter.com/snoozebuttonfig/status/1083475384463773696?s=20) [to re-tweet](https://twitter.com/snoozebuttonfig/status/1090351160207310848?s=20)! And I have a tweet for the fic itself [here:D](https://twitter.com/carelica_/status/1204536801374933000?s=20)


	2. Blankets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He gathers blankets, soft things, scraps of textile tenderness.

  
  
  
There isn’t much wind, so he should go now. Wind on the Arctic tundra is an onslaught and he must get as far as he can before it picks up again. Some vehicles have been abandoned near the bunker, mostly scrap but one has a drizzle of gas in the tank and sparks into life when he turns the key in the ignition.

The roar of the engine is a shock, the loudest thing he’s heard since waking. The sound of it vibrates in his arms as he holds the wheel, the truck juddering over the uneven snow. He knows the gas won’t last, and he’s right--after a few miles, it sputters into silence. The sheer emptiness of the place creeps into the truck’s cab.

The man exhales slowly. This isn’t going to be a small thing. It’s waiting for him, the whole vast sweep, the strange haunted gray of it.

When he gets out the landscape is as flat as around the bunker, but without that low entrance it’s somehow even more stark. He bends his head, rubs his cheek gently against the soft fabric of his scarf. Then he starts walking.

He’s marched before. He recalls moments of so many other times—cold on any exposed sliver of skin, snow crunching under boots, the thud thud of _forward_ and the miles devoured as you move together into the horizon. But here he’s alone, there are no other sounds, no other boots, only a sky full of dark secrets and the thin whine of wind through tundra shrubs.

He keeps an eye on those clouds. They spell trouble.

He’s lucky it’s too late in the winter for the polar nights—the relentless dark would have made this journey harder. As it is, there’s enough diurnal variation that he can make progress, though he doubts he’ll reach Oymyakon today. His steps uncurl into miles and the wind picks up, a lonely slap of force against snow and shrub, and something else is building under the murmur of freezing air. It’s—voices. Whispers. The man bites his lips under the scarf, hunches his shoulders, and keeps going, but the sounds become louder, more distinct. Multiple languages, none quite audible, but he can tell none of the words are kind.

He keeps going, feet crunching into the snow, a small figure moving into the wild.

It’s almost a relief when the wind worsens to the point that the voices are drowned out. There’s nothing human about the sound now—it’s a scream across the tundra, the wind a huge creature filling land and sky. He has to get under cover.

There’s no time. The best he can do is a trench. Quick. He falls to his knees, takes out the hunting knife. Starts scraping away the snow, slicing it into bricks.

His muscles are starting to spasm. Even in gloves, his right hand is growing clumsy but his left is as efficient as ever, slicing and stacking the ice even as his chest aches and the sky wails. By the time he’s dug the trench the wind is a solid wall of force. It’s too strong for him to stand so he hunches, falls into the trench, gasping, and _yes_ , mercy--the wind is less brutal here.

He crouches, rolls out the groundsheet, hardly able to see in the blowing snow. He gropes his hands above the trench to grip some of the improvised bricks from the digging, stacks them inside the trench along the edges, wedges a groundsheet across the trench, between them. It won’t be enough. This storm isn’t gonna let up.

He grits his teeth. He’s going to have to climb out again, rig up ice blocks over the roof. He braces, and raises his head cautiously over the side.

It’s like being punched. The world’s already a grey, malevolent swirl and the wind’s brutal. He climbs out, keeps his body as low as he can, clings to the earth as the sky convulses above him. His dark hair’s escaping his cap, making it even harder to see. He finds them by touch alone and slides some of the snow and bricks over the polythene. Improvised roof and insulation. _Get below._

The entrance to the snow— _coffin_ , his mind supplies—is dark but it’s life not death and he slides in without hesitation, feet first, to lie full-length in the trench.

The escape from the wind hits him as pure visceral relief. He’s not buffeted anymore. His body is cold and aching but the wind’s muffled by the snow and lying there he can hear his own breathing. It’s slowing, increasingly regular. Peaceful. It could be claustrophobic—the darkness, the confined space—but it feels secret. He’s hiding. 

Sleep comes slowly, but it comes. As he drowses off, he thinks: _I’m sleeping in ice again, but it’s not the same. Right now, for a moment, I’m free._

He’s wrapped in ice on the high tundra and, for a while, he’s not afraid.

* * *

  
  


His sleep is uneasy, the wind still raging. He drifts between unconsciousness and scraps of memory for hours. Then—

__

His own hand, silver, passing in front of his face. Aching loss, his chest tight with panic and pain. Years. Time folding by, blurring past, waking every time into a world that’s new and a world that’s never his. Someone is missing, someone real and true who made the world matter just by being in it, and he can’t even remember their face.

__

Then words. Words that carved him, changed him.

__

"Sergeant Barnes."

__

His _name_. Barnes. James Buchanan Barnes. _Sergeant James Barnes, the 107th._ Warmth floods him, he knows who he _is_ , but the warmth isn’t just from the name––someone is looking at him, a person like sunshine. Then that shining gleam is gone. His shoulder is pure distilled pain and a cruel voice is smiling.

__

"The procedure is already started. You are to be the new fist of Hydra. Put him on ice."

__

* * *

He bursts out of the snow trench, gasping, tearing his way up into light. _No. No._ He’s struggling with the polythene and snow, still trapped in the vicious dream. He’s sobbing, hunched in the wreckage of his shelter, gagging, convulsed with regret. He’s James. He’s _James._ He’s _not_ the fist of Hydra. He’s _not._

He is, though.

He kneels, gasps, face wet.

His breathing is ragged, but there’s no other sound. The world is still and gleaming, silent and bright. Sunlight shines on the new drifts and there’s no human in sight--except for himself, if he still counts. He looks at his hands. _James. I’m James_.

He tries to believe it.

* * *

James is thinking about words.

He’s crossing the Indigirka before he reaches Oymyakyon. The river’s still frozen, its movement arrested into swags and drapes. He’s hardly seeing them, though, because his languages are tangling inside him. He knows that since he woke up, Russian and English have meshed and overlapped. Right now he’s thinking of two words— _blood_ and _кровь_ —and neither is helping him make sense of what he is seeing.

He can see the outskirts of the town from here. He’s still on the frozen river, highly exposed, but he’s seen no sign of movement, not even from the horses that are so important in this community. What’s drawing his eye is the red. Thin veins of scarlet trail over the snow.

James carefully pulls his SIG-Sauer, crouches closer to the ground, and moves silently to the shore. There’s little cover on the tundra, but he does what he can with the shrubs. As he gets closer to the town he sees there’s still no sign of the sturdy ponies of Yakutia. This is bizarre. But the red trails—yes, there are more of those. They’re stretching across the snow, reaching towards the river, and clustering more thickly as he approaches the tiny town.

As soon as he reaches one, James bends to examine it. It’s dramatic against the snow, thick and dark and clotted, but it’s not blood. It’s a plant. Some strange red growing thing, curling thin tendrils over ice.

James doesn’t touch it. He straightens and keeps moving towards the silent town.

* * *

Oymyakon is a tiny settlement so James doesn’t expect it to be bustling, but the sheer degree of desolation takes him by surprise. Snow. Drifts of it, even more than usual for this time of year, and it’s heaped up against all the dwellings: the small houses, the stables for the Yakut horses, the traditional shelters. There’s no sign of any movement, no tracks. Deserted, then.

He bows his head, leans against the sharp wind and heads into the heart of the settlement. His isolation feels even sharper here, surrounded by things that were once for and of humans. An orange truck, weighted with so much snow the axle is breaking. A shovel handle, barely visible beside a snowdrift blocking a doorway. The quiet houses. And everywhere the strange vines, harsh against the snow, tendrils dark as clotted blood.

He stands in the silent town of bloody vines, and wonders.

  
  


* * *

He grits his teeth, chooses a house at random, and starts clearing the snow. It’s hard work. It’s dangerous to sweat in the Arctic, but it’s unavoidable now—the work of shifting this weight of snow isn’t trivial, even for him. That thought hangs uneasily in his mind, the sure knowledge that he isn’t normal.

He works to the scrape of steel on ice and his own breathing. There’s no other sound in this place that once held five hundred.

When he gets inside, it’s with a rush of snow and a creak of wood. He catches himself before he falls through the rotted door. Inside, it’s dark, snow still covering the windows, and the smell of mold reminds him for a moment of the bunker. Thick walls, a low house, hunched against the relentless wind. He moves through it quickly—three rooms, one with a bed, another with a stove and sink, a bathroom. No sign of any people. Clothes, some books. The kitchen even has some food supplies, tins under the sink: _Шпро́ты_ , sprats, and the ubiquitous pale blue tins of condensed milk. He shoves the un-swollen ones into his bag.

In the bedroom, he stares at the bed. It has a quilt in cheerful red and blue, and he moves towards it hesitantly. He gathers the quilt into his arms. It’s smelly, musty, but he brings it instinctively to rub against his cheek, closes his eyes again. It’s like the first touch of the scarf on his face at the bunker, but these are bigger. He could be _wrapped_ in them.

He needs more. This is urgent. He stumbles to his feet, moves back out into the snow, and goes from house to house. He ignores the cold, the desolation, the ruined cars and mildewed belongings. He has a mission. He gathers blankets, soft things, scraps of textile tenderness.

The ensuing nest is ragtag and dirty but when he nestles into it, turns his face into it, it’s almost like–contact. It’s like being touched.

The fabric is kind. His tears of relief don’t trouble it.

* * *

Now it’s night. He’s huddled in the third house he entered, wrapped in the blankets he recovered from each of the places. His torch is casting a round circle of light on the ceiling but he’s not looking at that. He’s looking at the quilt in his hands. It reminds him of something.

He traces the lines between the squares, the careful stitches. It looks like it was done by a machine, and that isn’t quite right. For a moment he can see hands, work-callused and delicate fingers, moving a needle quickly through the cloth, and the memory goes along with this rush of … feeling, a lightness and tightness in his chest. Smiling.

He frowns, tracing another square, and slowly the scene comes into focus. It’s a room full of people, full of talk and laughter and the smell of … cabbage, yeah. He’s holding fabric like this, and … _Becca_ , she’s ... she’s his sister, and she’s laughing at him for his attempt at sewing, but _he’s actually pretty fucking good thanks very much_ , and they’re all laughing, and … his _ma_ is smiling.

He drops the quilt as if it’s burning. He’s breathing fast but he can’t refuse the memories now, they are hungry and they are layered and he’s _there_ , again, in that close-knit room full of the smells of food and the voices of family and soft fabric under his hands.

James stands, abrupt, moves to lean his forehead to the clammy wall, out of the circle of light. His head is about to burst. He can’t refuse the memories, they are dripping in, relentless. _Becca_. She worked at that garment factory, she got fabric offcuts and … his _ma_ quilted with them. Winifred. Winifred _Barnes._ In Brooklyn.

They were a family.

There’s more. There’s someone else there, too, a gleam of gold on the edge of the memory, someone he can’t quite bear to look at yet, but that tug of gold triggers a surge of longing to sharp he gasps. The only word that comes to him is … home.

He stands in the dark for a long time, shaking at the edge of the circle.


	3. Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I remember all of them._

  
  


He’s staring into a mirror and he’s terrified.

He wanted to get clean, and there’s a bathroom here, there’s even bar soap, so he dug a firepit in the lee of the house and boiled water to take the edge off the melted ice. He washed his hair and body. Now he’s looking into glass and his heart is about to beat out of his chest.

The face he sees staring back is pale, with wide, fearful eyes. He has grazes around his cheekbones, probably from the storm. His fingers move, trembling, to his smooth chin. He remembers shaving, but there’s no hair here. Did his ... handlers… remove the hair there, for some reason? Maybe for the mask. He remembers that, black and heavy.

He can’t look away from his own reflection. It’s not quite right. He swallows, looks at the scissors he’s holding. It makes sense to cut his hair. It got in his way in the storm, and the last thing he needs is obscured vision in an already challenging terrain. He lifts the scissors slowly, and starts to cut. As the locks of hair fall on the floor a new person emerges. Someone he recognizes and doesn’t, unfamiliar, familiar, and--

_"Keep still, you dumbass, or I’ll catch your ears."_

The memory of laughter fills his chest, and he sees a narrow line form between his eyes in the mirror.

_"Clumsy? What a shame, pal. Hard to be an artist then, I guess."_

_Warm slender hands pushing his shoulders down hard. "Stay there, you jerk," and at the pressure of the hands and the affection in the voice something lights up inside him, through him. On impulse he seizes the hand on his right shoulder and pulls it to his lips._

It’s gone. He’s here, in Siberia, holding scissors. There’s nothing but his own scared pale eyes and worried frown in the mirror, but the phantom pressure of strong hands stays with him. Warms him, even as he moves through this cold, quiet place.

  
  


[ ](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1105036204997861378)

  
  


Over the course of the next two days he finds the skeletons of twenty-five people and three horses. He doesn’t touch them.

(He can’t help noticing that the blood vines hang thick in those houses and stables.)

He has a feeling it could be a year or more since whatever happened ... happened, but clearly most people had already left when it did. The absence of the Yakut horses is even stranger than the absence of the people. The horses were central to survival here.

He comes across the blood vines regularly, though they aren’t everywhere in town. He avoids them, though he couldn’t say why. They don’t resemble any plants he remembers from the region, and they seem to breathe out a distinctive smell, dusty and gamy and sweet.

Where did everyone _go_? Did they survive? Was there a … localized plague? Some terrible disaster just in the polar north? But even as he reaches for that idea, he remembers the silent satellites.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It’s the third night, and he’s hunched over a small fire built in the lee of the house. He’s heating stew from more of the tins. He’s not hunting yet, though he’s collected enough brass wire to set up snares. It’s reckless, to have stayed here this long. He knows _they_ will come back. They’ll wipe him, reduce him to nothing but fear and murder. It’s been so tempting, though, to stay here, amid the detritus of ordinary lives. To feel almost human again. He’s been so cut off for so long.

He pushes the wood with his hunting knife to help the fire settle, and golden sparks leap against the night.

He can’t stay in Yakutia, not even in the Arctic circle. It’s beautiful, but the climate is too harsh for someone to survive here alone, and the permanent darkness of midwinter and the summer bogs make life here hard in so many ways. Besides, _they_ will look for him here. He has to get away, and if he is going to go, he needs to go _now_. Travelling fast in the polar north in summer is impossible, even with a sled or SNO-Cat. He knows how the terrain changes. He can see it. Frozen ground melts to treacherous marsh, and slippery, decaying shrubs make every step deceptive. Midges rise in relentless dark clouds, surrounding a person, driving them mad. If he needs to travel fast—and he does—he needs to go now.

But go where?

James bites his lip. He can’t think about that now. All he knows is: _I can’t stay here._

  
  


* * *

He prepares, raids the stores and houses one last time. The toothpaste he finds tastes stale and is crumbling, but toothbrushes are welcome and he makes a stash of those even if it’s easy enough to make a toothbrush out of a birch twig. An analogue watch, good for navigation. A whistle. He hesitates over that, he doesn’t plan to be calling attention, but he keeps it anyway. A tiny foldable lightweight tent, automatic inflation—useful for emergencies, although usually he’ll create a more solid nightly shelter with snow. The tent’s orange, too visible, and he still has to be careful. He packs all the batteries and candles he can find and then, with a wry twist of his lips, all the string he can find, too—he’ll need that when the batteries run out and he has to make his own candles. 

For a moment he can almost feel it: that deep dark, the true dark. The lightless tundra at night.

He shakes his head, focuses. He gets plastic bags for water collection from foliage, and rolls brass wire into a hoop—he’ll cut it and use it for snares. Fishing supplies are ideal, that’s easy even when rivers are frozen. Outdoor gear, groundsheets. Snow shoes and spares—they won’t last, and sure, he can improvise with branches but those are even more short-lived. He’s relieved when he finds a metal box. It looks like it was a lockbox, but it’s cracked open and, yeah, it’ll work as a Yukon stove. He gets a rucksack, a blanket bandolier and a sled to pull and ride on the high tundra. He chooses one with fresh sealskin tacked beneath it to help it move swiftly.

For a moment, as he fastens the skin, he has a glimpse of riding the ice, flying into the gray. Silent freedom.

  
  


* * *

The last thing he does is prepare a fire carry, heating hot coals in a fire until they glow deep and red and warm at their heart. 

He’s watching the fire, and he’s uneasy. The coal’s heating well, and the carry bag is ready—soft cloth lined with dry moss—but a memory’s jostling, something sharp and sweet and unbearably painful.

He remembers coal shining deep red in a grate. A heavy coal scuttle, carried up many flights of narrow wooden stairs. He’s out of breath, he’s climbing, but someone at the top is laughing. Someone’s waiting up there, someone he _must_ keep warm— 

A coal falls with a crackle and James is snapped back to the present, staring at red and black and surrounded by white.

He blinks, drags his hand over his face. It’s going to be hard, but he has supplies. He glances over at the bags and scavenged gear, propped in the doorway of the house, and is suddenly struck that people _owned_ these. He’s taken fragments of domestic, ordinary lives. He’s taking … _human_ things.

The shock of the thought makes his whole body flinch. His heart’s pounding and he staggers to his feet, stumbles out into the wild.

  
  


* * *

He walks for about an hour before he can bear to hear what he’s thinking. It’s a litany, over and over. _I don’t deserve to be in a human town. I’m a murderer. I’m a monster._

Eventually he slumps to his knees, hopeless, and faces the truth.

 _I remember all of them_.

And he _does_. The flood of faces, scared or pleading or defiant but all the same, in the end, all dead and cold and empty—but he doesn’t empty, he fills _up_ , with faces and shame and horror. He brings his hand over his eyes but it doesn’t block the visions. Then something makes him look up.

It’s a man.

James crouches instantly, every sense alert, scanning. It’s a _Podpolkóvnik_ , a lieutenant-colonel—he recognizes the distinctive peaked cap and heavy dark coat of the Russian armed forces, and knows the insignia. He’s about a hundred feet away, standing by a silent vehicle, looking in the other direction. They’re gonna find him.

Terror slices through him so fast he can’t breathe. He’s not alone. He knew he wasn’t. He has to get out of here.

The man hasn’t turned. He still has time. James retreats, careful, silent, step by slow step. The man still doesn’t look his way. James’ movements are painfully gradual. After about fifty feet the man jerks his head to the left but he doesn’t turn, and James continues, until at a hundred feet he turns and _runs_.

When he reaches the town his panic makes the houses seem smaller, meaner. There’s no refuge here, no protection, not from _them_. He must go _now_.

The coals are red and sullen at the bottom of the fire, and he quickly stacks them in the moss fire carry, shoves it in the rucksack. He can’t take a SNO-Cat now, the sound would give him away, and he needs to _move—_ but then he pauses. 

He’s gripped again by the sharp horror of his realization out on the flats, the terrible knowledge that he is a monster.

Maybe he should let himself be caught. Maybe he should ... comply.

He isn’t human, after all.

Then something uncurls in him, something defiant, desperate, scared but true, and he’s moving, he’s pushing the sled, and it kisses the snow so sweet and smooth and yes, he can go, he _will_ go. He doesn’t deserve a town and he doesn’t deserve humanity. But he doesn’t deserve torture, either. 

He isn’t human, and that’s fine. He’ll be a creature instead. A creature of the ice places.

  
  


* * *

He’s alone and he’s cold and the clouds are watching him. It’s been 12 hours since he left Oymyakon under cover of darkness and dawn is breaking chill and gray over the ice flats. As he walks he keeps looking up at the clouds because they are the only thing that’s moving. They’re going somewhere. The sky has more life than he does.

Exposure on the ice does violence to his mind. After a while the emptiness becomes a way of being: he’s a smudge of gray moving through gray, no edges to his body or mind. A wisp of air in a sky that twists and moves with its own ferocious life.

 _Scrape scrape_. Boots on rock, on grass.

The vastness is too much. He doesn’t have enough kind memories yet, not enough to hold back the emptiness around him and the hollowness inside, but when the panic mounts he tries to remember the quilt. The hands folding the patchwork, the smell and the light and laughter of it. He tries to hold that memory close for comfort, but it slips away too. The wind and cold and emptiness get louder every mile.

He keeps going anyway. The mist curls in on him and takes something more than warmth.

* * *

  
  
That night he huddles in a snow shelter, cold and fearful. Every part of him aches, the slow, deep drag of exhaustion biting deeper than the serum can fix, and the next day he walks in a daze. The blizzard’s ebbed but it’s as if he’s still in it, tugged by the wind, cheeks raw with ice. The wind’s in his head and no less cruel.

There’s a tree. It’s fallen, over the river, and the upsidedownness of it, the tilted leaves and wrongness of it, is somehow soothing, jars him out of the confusion and grayness. He staggers towards it, rests a gloved hand on the bark, leans and breathes. It’s contact, of a sort. Something about touching another living thing makes him come to himself, makes the confusion ebb. He realises how quiet it is, how cold. He’s still so alone, the snow and silence stretching to the horizon.

But he’s here, he’s alive. His hand is on a tree. 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Sunday: ‘James’ gets company!


	4. Company

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's not alone anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO excited to share this chapter, guys! I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> I’ve made a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3nuCCH5UyHWP00xzPMgnmj?si=P_6pvY6oT7KOYQDB5Ul3Zg) and a [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dg32rRxIVZzypaTWDi1AW9d79j-Ry3D). Also, CW: brief mention of James hunting for food: a bird and a moose.

  
  


A bird’s calling, the long lonely wail of a predator. James looks up and for a moment can only see dazzle, his eyes night-blind from staring into the campfire. The hunting bird falls silent and there’s no other sound. His question returns again, loud in the stillness.

 _Where can I go?_

He left Oymyakon three days ago, and hasn’t seen any trace of soldiers or any people at all. He needs to find better shelter, needs to head south, find a place to hide and, well. Survive.

He frowns again, bites his lip. There was a memory, that came to him in the bunker ...

 _light through leaves, and the sound of water_

He closes his eyes tightly, presses his fingers to either side of his forehead, tries to hunt down that memory, that gleam …

 _Falling through the sky, night, moonlight, the whip of cold air and para-silk, pain. Pines are a silhouette above him ..._

_... soft light through leaves, and the sound of water. He’s running, running for the sheer joy of it, the leaves and grass beneath his feet, the sweep of the trees above._

_They sent him here to struggle and maybe to die and instead he’s alive, he’s soaked in joy. His blood is singing._

James leans back against the wall, shaking. The Altai. The memory is clear now. His handlers dropped him there in some fucked-up training exercise. They gave him a bare minimum of training and left him with absolutely nothing for three months in late winter and early spring. He was supposed to suffer, but that wasn’t all that happened.

The memory is so sharp and beautiful that he feels tears sting. The Golden Mountains of the Altai.

He hunches in the shelter, the lampshine gold on the canvas. He thinks of cool green shadows under conifers, the whisper of water, and the scent of pine needles. The sweep of lakes, and the clear blue of lake under sky. Snow and mountains. Quiet.

There’s a sudden ache in his chest. It takes him a moment to recognise it as … longing. A kind of homesickness. He can only remember being in Altai Republic twice, and the second time he was there for something dreadful. His mind flinches from those details, and they stay covered, but he remembers the beauty and peace of the first visit.

Huddled in this snowy shelter, he longs for those cool trees, those quiet tarns. He’d be alone there too, but maybe it wouldn’t feel so lonely.

And why not? I mean, it’s far enough away it won’t be where they look for him. It’ll take him six months to get there. It’s southern enough to be easier to live and still remote enough to be safe. But the truth is that all those practical reasons fade beside the fact that it’s beautiful, and for a little while, it was home.

The word "home" tugs at his heart and again he remembers that flash of gold, like soft silk under his hand. He flinches and it vanishes, and this fragment he doesn’t chase. Maybe some kinds of memory hurt too much.

  
  


* * *

He has a lot of ground to cover and little time to gather food on the way. At night he sets snares with the brass wire from Oymyakon, or, if he’s near the river, he breaks holes through the ice to set a fishing trap. He’ll cook whatever he caught the previous night, usually fish but hare, sometimes, if the snares worked. There seem to be fewer of those than usual, too.

His nightly routine is to cook by improvising a Yukon stove. The charcoal that builds up at the base of the metal box is useful for filtering water, and while cooking he scrutinizes his gear, carefully mending any tears. Gaps can be fatal. When he gets nearer to the taiga he’ll use pine resin and ash to seal them, and he can make needles from animal bone. He strips in his tent, scrubs himself red and glowing with handfuls of snow, gets his feet and hands clean and bandages any abrasions. He knows what the Arctic can do if given an inch.

In the morning he guts and cleans caught fish or game while boiling the day’s water, and drinks some hot with animal fat. Nothing about the palearctic is easy on the body. Staying warm requires constant effort, and cold is a thing of horror for him for so many reasons. He crosses ice with the staff held out at waist height, copying the traditional strategy of the Yakut tribes. He avoids dark or clear patches, but even then ice is unpredictable so he holds his staff horizontally with both hands as he moves, and knots the sled to his straps and webbing to drag it. He’s good at judging where he needs to crawl full-body rather than trusting his weight, and just to be safe he stores a magnesium block fire starter, flints and kindling in wrapped plastic at the top of the rucksack closest to his body. Emergency warmth.

He collects moss as he goes, and dries it out every night by the fire, for insulation in shoes and his sleeping bag and to pack around the coal fire carry. Every night he nurtures those hot coals, watching the red heart of them shining in the flames.

Every night he thinks: _I had to keep you warm. Who were you?_

* * *

  
  


It’s a long way. Why not just hide up somewhere, make a homestead somewhere else? He finds good sites, well defended, near water and trees. The walking is the point, though. He needs to move. He wants to _choose_ something. To make a decision, to say: I am this person. I chose to be here, to move through places, to make a story with my body. So he keeps walking, and each day the Altai gets closer.

He doesn’t spare time to hunt while travelling in the day but he catches birds opportunistically—they’re so unused to humans that they don’t fly away when he approaches. He sets their eggs in the fire carry of coals in his rucksack to bake as he walks. The birds are fearless. James wonders what that must be like.

The next bird he sees is a snow bunting, who turns calm eyes towards him when he approaches. She’s brooding a clutch but she doesn’t even spread her wings, not until he takes her neck in his hands. He’s quick so she doesn’t feel the pain, not like the Winter Soldier’s victims used to, not like _them_ , and now he’s shaking in the snow, the bird limp in his hands and memory thick around him.  
  


* * *

At night he sharpens his knives and cleans his guns and thinks how it’s maybe screwed up that he hated killing people but still cares about the tools. He feels tenderness when he oils the gunstock, hones the blades. They’re an extension of himself, a fluid, seamless thing, responding to his will. Like his arm.

He bends it, watches the silver gleam in the firelight. It’s beautiful, he thinks, with mild surprise. The metal shines, articulated, intricate. In the firelight it looks jewelled.

  
  


* * *

Another evening’s drawing in and James is skinning a hare. It got caught in his snare last night before the day’s hike and now he’s going to cook it. He’s busy, but he’s so lonely, and it still feels like his part-known past stretches under him like an abyss, like a canyon in a cruel mountain pass, covered with snow, wind whipping past cold and cruel—

He blinks. He has company.

It’s a wolf. A huge, white wolf, hair thick and fluffy, easily 3 feet tall, 5 and a half feet long. It’s watching him, ears flipped forward, and it doesn’t seem about to attack or flee.

James stands slowly, holding the dead hare. He doesn’t have any words in his mind at this moment, just an instinct, and he puts the hare on the ice, takes a few steps back. The wolf stares at him, its gaze steady.

It has unusual eyes. Blue. That’s odd for wolves after weaning, and it’s clearly an adult. It looks healthy, thick neck scruff, fur not threadbare. Doesn’t look solitary at all, a lone wolf would be starving, so—he tenses—others will be near.

He stands, wary, rests his hands on his SIG Sauer. The wolf doesn’t react, continues to gaze at him with those calm, intelligent eyes. Then it steps forward, fur swaying in the wind.

James doesn’t move, doesn’t retreat or look away. The wolf bends, regal, takes the hare in its mouth and shakes it once, hard, in those strong jaws. Then it turns, so fast, and runs into the dusk. After about a hundred meters it pauses, looks back, and James has the strong sense it isn’t at all afraid. Then it’s gone.

[ ](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1105036204997861378)

* * *

After that, he has a white ghost, a presence tracking him across the tundra. He never sees any sign of another wolf. This wolf—female, he thinks—genuinely seems packless, though he can’t make sense of why she looks so healthy. No lone wolf eats well in winter.

She’s eating now, though. He’s setting food aside for her every night, even if he doesn’t always see her. She often comes when he’s asleep and it’s a rare morning that his camp doesn’t show her footprints around his fire.

The red tendrils are still about. They became less plentiful after he left Oymyakon, but they’re still here, trailing alongside other shrubs, sometimes spreading thinly over frozen rivers. What _are_ they?

* * *

  
  


There’s still no sign of anybody following. He knows they are out there, though, and he doesn’t take risks. He uses cover when he can find it, and is careful to cover his campfire when he leaves to make it slightly less obvious. Fresh snow is their friend, covering their tracks.

His first breakthrough in understanding the vines comes when he’s crossing the Reka Aldan.

The broad banks of that river are absolutely covered with blood vines, and they’re unusually thick over the ice. James doesn’t have any idea why until he cuts a hole in the ice to try fishing. He’s shocked to catch more fish in half an hour than he has in three hours before. As he’s filleting them and chilling them on the ice, a suspicion takes form.

Can the vines _listen_ to life? In Oymyakon, after all, they were thickest near where there had been evidence of people and animals, and maybe here they can sense the fish. He thinks of the fish, darting in their cool blue world under the frozen ceiling. His suspicion about the vines seems confirmed when at the next lake, there are hardly any vines, and there are also hardly any fish. They must be drawn to life. 

Maybe it’s weird to think of the tendrils listening, but James knows that consciousness isn’t just for humans, now, because he’s not one. He isn’t a person, he doesn’t deserve to be one, but he can still think, still feel. 

Meanwhile, the wolf is getting bolder. One evening, about two weeks into their parallel journey, James looks up from mending his tent canvas and sees she’s come fully into the circle of firelight. As always, her strange blue eyes are steady. He slowly sets down the canvas.

He swallows. Tries to speak. He’s been silent so long it takes two attempts.

"Hey."

She doesn’t respond immediately. Then she walks up to him, stepping delicate and precise. With him sitting down they’re almost face to face. She’s so close he can see the bursts of lighter blue around her pupil.

For a moment James holds his breath, and then the wolf flips her ears forward, drops its muzzle in a jerking nod, and whines softly.

James can’t help smiling. His chest is warming with a deep, amazed delight.

"I’m James," he says, and the words shock himself, to be saying— _here I am, this is who I am._ It comes to him in a rush that this is the first time he’s introduced himself since he emerged from the decades-long nightmare. He swallows, focuses, looks at her. Holds out his hand, tentative, and offers his name.

When she rests her muzzle in it, briefly, he has to close his eyes against the tears threatening to spill. She’s a friend. He has a friend.

That night they sleep curled up, James’ face buried in her fur, snug in his— _their_ —warm tent.

* * *

  
  


Wolf takes to fire pit and tent in a way that surprises him. She’s wild —there’s nothing pet or dog-like about her, and such domesticities seem at odds with what she is. She’ll stare into the fire for hours beside him, will curl up under nylon canvas, but somehow never loses her wolf-ness.

Those eyes are so strange. He stares at them, wondering. Must be a mutation, for an adult wolf to have such coloring. She gazes back at him then looks about herself—at the snow, the shrubs, the straggles of blood vines. He wonders what those eyes see.

  
  
  


* * *

_He’s drowning in blood. It’s hot and thick and he can’t get out of it, he can’t even tell which way is up. He’s reaching for someone on the other side of it, someone pure and clean who could never come down here. Someone good. James doesn’t deserve to touch him, he doesn’t deserve to see him. He should sink into the hungry red._

James gasps, struggles to wakefulness, to shake off the nightmare, but the _very air_ is crimson. The blood vines are _here_. They’re hanging thick over the entrance to the tent.

James startles, scrambles back as far as he can. What the _fuck_.

His movement wakes the wolf, and he reaches one hand towards her, instinctively reassuring. She ruffs quietly under her breath, swings her long muzzle to the front of the tent. James is hardly breathing, watching the vines.

Then the wolf stands up, and pushes her way through them, without fuss.

James’ heart is hammering, and he’s absolutely not reassured by her nonchalance. How did they grow so fast, reach his tent? Nothing about this isn’t unnerving, but he needs to get out of here.

Eyes still on the vines, he draws his hunting knife. He covers his face as much as he can with his scarf and makes sure his gloves are tight. Then he stretches his arm full length and drags the knife across the top of the vines, where they’re secured. They break easily, they’re not firmly attached, and for a moment it looks like they’re _writhing,_ the red cords twisting like flesh. It’s an illusion, surely. James flicks them away from the entrance with the long blade, and only when they are fully clear does he emerge.

He bursts from the tent into a scarlet world. The vines spread thick over the snow, and their smell rises from them, meaty and musty. How the hell did they grow so fast? Where did they come _from?_

They clearly spread quickly, he’s suspected as much. Until now he’s been thinking of them as some kind of ivy or fern with the metabolic rate of bamboo, but now he’s so close to so many of them they make him think more of seaweed crossed with fungi. He remembers seeing red seaweed heaped up on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, to Siberia’s south-west. The vines have similar small crescent patterns, like suckers, and are thick and meaty with the seeming texture of cold mushroom flesh.

"What the fuck." He mutters it under his breath, heartfelt. Then he notices what the wolf is doing.

She’s moving through the vines, calmly, carefully, seeming to take care not to tread on them but showing no fear. She keeps lowering her muzzle to them, but doesn’t seem to be sniffing, more like—

James blinks, rubs his eyes, stares again. It’s like—like she’s _greeting_ them.

She keeps moving through the camp. When she reaches a particularly thick cluster, draped over a nearby rock, she makes the first sound he’s heard her make this morning, a kind of low _rhuff_ , and her ears flip forwards, and she pauses.

James doesn’t move or speak. He stands, surrounded by the scarlet tendrils, watching his friend move through a space that she understands and he can’t. He looks at the wolf, really sees her. Recognizes her as his friend, his packmate, attuned to knowledge and wisdom he will never have. Spectral white, tall, uncanny. She lives with him, but she’s never a pet—she’s a peer, a companion.

After a while she pads back to him, still looking relaxed. She whines interrogatively.

"Yeah." His voice is husky, so he coughs to clear it. "Yeah, okay. Look, I—I think we should leave. Let’s get—let’s eat breakfast a bit further on, yeah?" He can’t help looking back at the vines. "Let’s just. Let’s just go."

She doesn’t object, stays nearby while he breaks camp, and keeps stride with him as they move away. He glances back, and sees them like blood on the snow. Coagulated tendrils, thick and strange.

* * *

The journey gets easier after the wolf joins him. They move across the ice flats, heading towards the tree line of the taiga that is now a blurry promise on the horizon. Her blue gaze is a beacon for him, steadiness, and she responds to him with expressive ears and muzzle nudges, interrogative whines and soft growls. He talks to her a lot.

"I’m going to the Altai."

She swivels her ears to him. They’re by their nightly fire, making do with three-day-old fish today--the night traps have had slim pickings lately. Her eyes gleam in the dark and his chest feels warm again at the thought that she’s chosen to be here with him.

"It’s beautiful there. Do you know it? Maybe you know it. I know you guys roam far." He’s quiet for a moment, watching the fire. "It’s peaceful, you know. Mountains and trees and such blue sky." She’s listening, watching him. He swallows. "I had to choose, you see. Where to go. And I." He frowns, looks into the dark, obscurely ashamed. "I don’t remember some things. I’m James, though." His voice trails off. Quietly. "I’m James."

Does it matter? Here, beneath these trees, with a wolf and vast tracts of silent snow, and nobody who can speak in miles? Does his name matter any more?

James sighs, prods the fire. No, it doesn’t matter really, but it’s something he has, and he has so little, has _had_ so little, and he’ll keep it.

Wolf whines and he sees she’s eaten all her fish. "I know, pal." He’s sympathetic. "We’re fresh out of anything. We’ll catch more tomorrow."

She growl-barks and stands and he’s aware, again, of the power in her stance, the strength. She looks directly at him, then turns and lopes into the dark. She’s a nocturnal hunter, after all. Maybe her hunt will be luckier than the snares have been for the last few days. 

James concentrates on the fire, extricating the hot coals and storing them snug in the moss fire carry. He treasures these, never lets them stay in the fire at night or they’ll be cold by morning. When he looks up, he realizes Wolf is still there, about 90 yards away, looking at him. Waiting.

He stands, slowly.

People can’t hunt in the dark. They can’t see well enough.

But … _he_ can.

Something sparks in him, a kind of hunger, and the daylight version of James Buchanan Barnes slides away and another James comes forward, another hunter at home in the night. He already moving, checking his knives. When she melts into the shadows, he follows. Two wild things, together.

* * *

  
  


It takes a long time, but they’re patient. They’re both persistence predators, after all: a wolf and a sniper. For a moment, James grins behind his scarf. The moose doe is tiring. They’ve tracked her for miles, and the moment she slows then James and the wolf move instantly as if they share one mind.

He’s running over blue snow and through blue shadow and he jumps onto the moose’s back, sees the wolf leap. He brings his knife down sharp to snap the spine at exactly the same moment that the wolf’s jaws close on the throat.

The moose crumples, her bulk crashing to the ground, cushioning James’ fall. She’s thrashing, her dangerous legs kicking, but he’s not budging and the wolf’s too savvy to get in range of the rear hooves. They wrestle the creature in a death grip until she stops kicking. Wolf tears at the carcass and there’s warm blood over James's hands and arms and he’s drinking it, deliberate and wise, remembering farmers did this, tapped even living animals for blood in winter. The scarlet heat hits his belly as visceral relief. Food.

After the first rush, they calm, and he looks at the wolf across the carcass. She looks back. The forest is pitch black in the shadows from birch and pine. A human couldn’t see well now, despite the crescent moon, but James can, and he can smell hot red blood.

Wolf turns her muzzle to the sky and _howls_.

James’ heart soars. The sound is pure defiance. It calls to him, makes a reckless joy rise in him, and he lifts his own voice, howling, shouting, their shared voices bright against the night. He’s laughing as he does it, daring to break silence, daring to _be_.

Their howl says: _together_. It says: _we survive_. It says: _we are pack._

  
  
  



	5. Echoes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Think of fire flickering against the dark, of warmth on your feet, and of peace. Think of trees above and a friend beside you. Think of rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Name tweak; I'm daphneblithe :D)
> 
> Most of the chapters in this fic end gently but this one is a little more tense - so you might wanna wait until next week if you want a bit more equilibrium! See endnote for more information.
> 
> Also, this chapter features the full exquisite art by [Frostbitebakery](https://twitter.com/i/events/1105036204997861378)!

  
  
As they curl up that night, James realizes he instinctively attacked as the big cats do, jumping onto the back of the prey and breaking its spine. They didn’t hunt like a man and a dog would hunt. They hunted like a wolf and a panther.

It fits. Bucky nestles into Wolf’s fur and rests his head on her flank. After all, neither of them are human.

* * *

The first signs of spring are coming and he needs to be careful with the thaw. He must be away from the midge clouds before then. He closes his eyes against the memory of insects battering his skin, a disorientating wildness of wings and buzzing and bites. They can literally drive a person insane, and the melted waters and swamps make palearctic summer travel painful and slow. But he’s making good time. He’ll get there before winter.

That night he makes camp at the edge of a tree line. He’s not quite reached the taiga yet, but scraps of that 2.5 million square mile forest have stretched into the tundra. He leaves the nylon tent folded up and carves a hollow in the snow around a pine, heaps the snow up either side like a nest and pulls branches down as an awning. In half an hour he has a fragrant cave.

Wolf is with him, curled up by his feet. They’re sharing hare that he snared relatively easily, since more animals are emerging as he comes further south. The fire’s about three feet away and snow is melting around it, gleaming against the blue night. He’s warm and the smell of pine is sharp and comforting—a kind astringency, different from the smell of the chemicals, the formaldehyde, the—no, don’t think of that.

Think of this instead. Think of fire flickering against the dark, of warmth on your feet, and of peace. Think of trees above and a friend beside you. Think of rest.

* * *

They’re heading south, loosely tracking the rivers, and human habitations are still rare. A month into their partnership they reach a small huddle of houses near a river, the Reka Vitim. Like everywhere else it seems empty. Gray buildings cluster together, still ice bound, and James isn’t surprised to see vines running through and among them. There’s no other sign of life.

He approaches cautiously. It’d be wiser to avoid all habitations, but provisions, equipment, more coals for his fire carry and, most of all, _intel,_ draw him magnetically. He might find out more about what’s happened.

  
  


* * *

It’s a shock to re-enter a built environment. He’s got used to the exposure of the ice flats, the utter lack of cushioning from the wind, and although the houses are low—one, two stories—the mass of them together blocks the fiercest gusts. He has a strong sense of being enclosed but he doesn’t feel apprehensive, only relieved. 

He wants to find shelter but he’s not an idiot, so he searches houses carefully, enters cellars when he finds them. In total he finds 16 human skeletons and 12 feral cats who flee, spitting. Vines are everywhere, thick and red.

And he finds a map.

It’s rolled out on a table in one of the kitchens. The room itself is a mess, drawers pulled out, dirty pots on the counters. The map itself at first looks ordinary but as James looks more closely he sees red symbols, splotches on the paper. He scrapes one with a fingernail and yeah, that was added with paint. Strange.

He leans closer. The marks are concentrated around the larger towns, with Kuanda virtually invisible under the paint. Smaller towns seem— _less affected_ is the phrase that comes to him, and yes, that’s fair, he feels the red is a warning. It’s got to mean the blood vines, right? Must be. He’s noticed they seem attracted to life and traces of life, and here it’s obvious that bigger towns have more red.

For a moment he can see it. Imagines towns, cities, wrapped in silent red. _Brooklyn_. Are they there, too? Does strange scarlet wind through tenements, hang down walls? Does it fill the parks, flourish in subway tunnels, wrapping trains in watery red light? Dread’s building in him. He needs to find—someone, a golden person, protect them, make sure the vines aren’t wrapping them, strangling—

He blinks. The urban phantasmagoria’s gone but it was so vivid, and the panicked imperative of _must protect_ still thrums in his blood, urgent.

He looks at the map again. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this was for an evacuation. They left in a hurry, that’s clear, and the map was left behind by accident. There are pencil marks, a thin line, no—he frowns—two lines, heading south on different routes. One, the slightly thicker line, follows the larger road south to larger towns and the other heads towards the taiga, on a similar route to the one James has planned.

His interest sharpens. Yeah, it’s the same trajectory. Some wanted to head that way too? Why? And what does all this have to do with the vines? The red must be warnings that they are thick in these places.

Something is nagging at him. It’s too … neat. He has a feeling that he’s missing something.

Sudden hopelessness hits him and he slumps in one of the wooden chairs by the table, his head in his hands. He can’t name or explain the grief that’s opened up in him. It’s a sense of the people of this small community meeting, desperate, setting out to—escape something? find something?—he doesn’t know, and the thing is, even if he’d been here then he wouldn’t have known, wouldn’t have been part of it, couldn’t have _helped_. He has skills, terrible skills, but he can’t use them to protect, to care, because other people wouldn’t want him to. He’s a black-clad monster with a shining arm, a Cold War ghost. He’s outside the human circle always, now. He’ll never be part of a team again.

He closes his eyes. Stop it, James. You’re lucky to be alive at all, to be away from the torture. To have escaped the _Chair_. You’re lucky to have the wolf alongside you. You’ve no goddamn right to feel—what, sad that you aren’t with people any more? You don’t deserve to be.

_I remember all of them._

The wide white spaces of the ice fields seem to open in him, carving him out.

* * *

  
  


He doesn’t know how long he’s slumped at the table but sudden barking rouses him. He startles, then scrambles outside into the dusk.The wolf is standing in the center of the road and—

_There’s something at the end of the street._

He can’t understand what he’s seeing. A coiling, curling, iridescent thing, swirling colors blue and green, whirling in twisting shapes. It’s about a hundred yards away and James doesn’t hesitate. No point in the knife, for this he wants _ranged_ , fuck saving the ammunition.

He pulls his SIG-Sauer, aims and fires.

Three things happen at once. The wolf stops barking and starts running _towards_ the thing, the bullet hits and the thing vanishes with an eye-watering folding of light, and James is hit with a backlash of force that throws him flat on his ass.

He’s hit his head and he’s dazed for a moment. That backlash makes no sense, especially over that distance. He’s dizzy, but the wolf’s beside him, nudging his chin with her muzzle and licking his face. He staggers up.

There’s no sign of that thing. 

Okay. Okay. He inhales, still shaky. "What the hell was that, pal?" He pats her shoulders, rubs her scruff, trying to steady his own breathing. "Never seen that before, huh?"

Wolf _rhuffs_ and starts walking towards where the thing was. She looks back, clearly expecting him to follow.

"Seriously?" But she’s right, he needs to know what it was, and he trails after her, head and ass aching, bewildered. If he was asked to describe what that thing was, he’d say something about the pulp science fiction he used to read in Brooklyn. He remembers those. Bright color covers and stories about aliens and space and invasions. _Amazing Stories_. The memories hang static and vivid, distinct.

"What the _hell_?" He breathes the question, crouches to look closer. There are vines on the snow, densely packed, and they seem unharmed, but the adjacent snow is melted and the earth scorched and—he peers—there’s a weird pattern in the burn marks, round, sucker-ish. Gazing at the pattern, he feels almost resigned. He doesn’t know what it means, but he knows it isn’t good.

The marks don’t look mechanically-created at all. The pattern’s organic.

The shapes are the same as the patterns on the vines.

* * *

They left the town five hours ago and struck out straight for the distant tree-line. They’re both quiet. James grabbed some tins from the houses by the river, so they’ll eat those tonight. He also took more coals to replenish his fire carry. He’d intended to stay there for a while but that plan evaporated in the face of weird-ass flickering spinning things with force fields that don’t follow the laws of physics.

The gradient’s steep. He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, plodding grimly into twilight.

Those science fiction pulps—he remembers them so well. Remembers that newsstand on Fulton, the sounds of the city all around him. In the memory there’s someone beside him, golden and real, and if James turns his head just a little he’ll _see_ him—

No. There’s only gray snow, gray sky, and the bare ice tundra. The wolf’s fur brushes warm under his hand, and he strokes her ruff. They keep walking.

* * *

His sleep is restless, the trees silhouetted against the night alternating with vivid, hallucinatory fragments. Memories.

"<He’s dead, you know>." It’s an officer, speaking Russian and leaning towards him, and James is cowering. He’s back in the Chair, back in the bunker, but it’s different, it’s full of bustling technicians in white coats. He can’t look at them, though, can’t look away from the man’s cruel smile. "<He’s dead. He crashed a plane into the Arctic, decades ago>." Paper’s pressed into James’ hands. "<Look for yourself>."

It’s an old, yellowed newspaper: the _New York Times_ , dated 5 March 1945.

_"CAPTAIN AMERICA’S SACRIFICE. Today the nation mourns the news that one of its best and bravest gave his life to save millions of his fellow Americans. A Nazi plane loaded with nuclear armament was set to crash into New York City but these evil designs were thwarted when its malevolent burden was brought down into the furthest reaches of northern ice. He gave his own life to do it."_

It has two pictures. One is a big guy in a mask and a red, white and blue suit, but James doesn’t pay attention to that one because there’s another picture too, and it’s—

He looks at the picture and something’s tearing inside him. It’s—

Gold and sharp and fierce.

It’s Stevie.

It’s _Stevie_ , wide-eyed, fierce, a challenge in every line of him. Oh God, the face he’s kissed, stroked, dreamed of. The face he loves, has always loved.

"<He’s dead, you see.>" The officer’s still talking. "<He’s been dead for forty years.>" And a scream rips through James’ heart.

* * *

  
  
James rips himself out of the dream memory, sobbing. _Stevie, Stevie, how could I have forgotten you._ He can’t see, his tears are a storm, and the memories are making sense now, they’re falling into place. Stevie, cutting his hair, his big hands heavy on James’ shoulders, his eyes sharp, teasing. Stevie, cold and not admitting it, coughing in their little tenement while James carries coal up, desperate to warm him. Stevie, beside him in the subway car, their shoulders touching, and James aches to take his hand and Stevie seems to know, looks back at him, dark eyes hot with promise.

And Stevie gasping and biting and moving on him, _in_ him, driving deep and hard and true until James breaks apart in his arms.

Then, afterward, Stevie sweat-slick and smiling. "Love ya, Bucky."

He’s Bucky. That’s what Stevie always called him.

Bucky staggers backward, falls onto the snow. He’s out of the tent, he doesn’t know how or when, but he’s in the snow and he’s remembered. He pushes his hood back and scarf down, heedless of the cold, desperate for air. Loss is slamming through him. He’s remembered Steve, only to realize he’s gone.

  
  


  
  
  


How did it take so long? Why wasn’t his name, his face, the first thing Bucky knew? But he knows the answer. He knows why he remembered the Howlies first, why he remembered Becca, Sarah, all of them before Steve.

It’s because remembering Steve hurts too much.

He can’t bear it. He can’t go on. That’s why he remembered this last of all. Remembering him, then losing him in that very same instant? He was surviving in a world without people. But he can’t survive in a world without Steve. It’s empty now in an entirely different way.

He’s dimly aware that the wolf is curled around him.

 _Steve_. All his bravery, recklessness and rage: five feet four of defiance. Hydra took even the memory of him away. They took away Bucky’s heart.

" _Goddamnit_ ," and Bucky’s slams his fists into the snow beside him, he stands up. He screams his loss, howls his rage and loneliness, and the wolf howls with him. Their shared grief tears the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky remembers Steve and also realizes certain people crashed a plane into the Arctic in the Second World War and probably didn't make it. It’s a lot for him to take in at once. But fear not! Upswing is swinging! We are progressing solidly and surely, with Bucky healing in every chapter.


	6. Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They should have closed the curtain, but just for a moment he didn't, because he was cupping Steve's face in his hands and Steve was so beautiful, so goddamn beautiful with the golden light on him.

Now that memories of Steve have started returning, they don’t stop. Bucky’s flooded with them, even when he is climbing hills, when he’s sliding down scree, when he’s walking, as now, over a frozen river. He’s Bucky now, already thinking of himself that way, remembering Steve saying it a hundred ways, in a hundred places. Echoes of Stevie haunt him even in the tundra, and echoes of himself, too—he’s been many things, and still holds traces of all of them. At least Steve never saw what Bucky turned into.

He keeps going, but each step is slower, his grief heavier than rucksack or sled. The space between him and Steve stretches into a wound he can’t survive, not even if his body does. There’s little point going on. Sometimes he wonders, almost idly, when he will give up. He can see it, his body in the snow, covered still and white. Silence.

He takes another step and hears a crack.

The wooden staff slams into the ice the moment he falls through it. He’s in the water, he can’t—the cold is too much, it—

His flesh hand slips off the wood and he’s under. Water over head, razors in nose and ears. His head snaps back in shock and all he can see is the ice, the cruel blank white over him, and he’s dying.

It’s so cold it’s not a temperature, it’s a violence, a slamming force. He can’t even feel the wet, and in sudden clarity he realizes he has only seconds to act or he will die here, now, Hydra science experiment or not. His metal hand is holding his staff. He is swinging loose in the water but his metal hand isn’t moving, it’s still above the ice, it’s an anchor, and he must _move move move—_

It’s so hard to think.

When he looks down through the water it’s so clear, like a valley in winter mountains. The blood vines are down there, scarlet, surprising, moving like seaweed. He’s so cold.

_Bucky! Hang on!_

Sleep is so close. He wants to sleep.

_Grab my hand!_

Steve’s reaching for him. Steve’s clinging to the side of the train and his face is twisted in desperation and fear and he’s reaching and Bucky just has to—has to reach out—Bucky’s dying but he can hear him so clearly, he can’t think but he clenches his hand on the staff, tries to pull himself up, and—he can’t. He can’t think. The cold is biting his mind, he can’t—

The train is moving so fast and the wind is pulling him, buffeting, dragging his clothes, pulling him down. He’s going to fall. His fingers start to slacken and it’s going dark.

The chasm waits far below, and it isn’t cold anymore.

_Comply._

He knows this voice, knows it well. The _Podpolkóvnik_ is down below him, with Zola and all the others, and Bucky belongs down there with them.

 _Comply_.

So many years of obedience and terror, a dark groove in his mind. More of his life was lived like that than ever walking on the earth in sunlight. He _is_ a creature of the ice places. The surface seems far away. Steve’s still calling, but the wind’s snatches his voice and pulls hard at Bucky, weighting him, dragging him down.

_Comply._

His metal fingers start to loosen. 

But. _No._

It’s a small, quiet thing, a deep impulse, a twisting in his chest. _No_. It’s deeper than his mind, older than his name, a solid secret core. _No, I will not comply_ , and as the words come to him so does strength, alertness, the cold newly sharp as awareness returns. That core kept him alive through years of suffering and now it pours itself into his limbs, his body, his mind, filling him with defiance, with _rage,_ meekness burning away in ice water.

 _I won’t comply, I will LIVE_ and he’s pulling more ice down with him, the weight of his arm shattering the ice, but he’s trying, fighting the ice and light and pain and he's out, he's _out_ , in the pure shock of the air.

Searing pain in his flesh shoulder and he’s being dragged; there’s growling. It’s—it’s Wolf, she’s pulling him, teeth in his flesh shoulder. He’s out. He’s on the ice. He lies gasping, the air unbearable on his skin.

He has less than five minutes to get dry and warm. The sudden thought is lucid but he can barely move. Wolf’s still dragging him, pulling him by his shoulder towards the shore. Now he’s trying to crawl. It’s only about ten feet but it feels like forever. Fresh snow, fall into it, roll, blot up water.

Three minutes left. Get fire. His hands are shaking and the rucksack is soaked. It takes four attempts to get the zip open, but the kindling and fire starters are in their plastic bag at the top and they are fine, they are _dry_. His flesh arm’s numb and he keeps falling, but the metal arm still works. He’s shaking but lays out the metal tray base for the fire, gets the moss on it, and lights it in less than 30 seconds. Two and a half minutes left. Shelter next.  
  
  


* * *

He’s done all he could, and now the gray is closing in. He’s in dry clothes, the shoulder wound is clean, and he’s in his sleeping bag. His face is buried into the thick fur by Wolf’s neck, and her flank curled around him. From here on it’s all about luck.

If you fall into subzero Arctic water, you die. It’s that simple. Hardly anybody gets out, and of those who do, hardly any make it. He knows that consciousness fails within 5 to 10 minutes, and death follows about twenty minutes later. He also knows that Hydra changed him in ways that meant he survived decades frozen in particular ways, but Arctic cold is a power far stronger and far older.

He’s sliding back down, slipping under the water. The wind is loud and the chasm is deep. He turns his face into Wolf’s flank, and his cheeks are wet. _Take my hand,_ but he can’t reach Steve, and now he’s falling, falling backward, down down past walls of ice.

* * *

  
  
Something’s licking his face. "Gerroff." He’s sleepy, he’s warm, he doesn’t want to move, but the licking doesn’t stop and now there’s a not-at-all-gentle push that jolts his shoulder into aching. "Ow!" but his grumbling doesn’t stop the nudging and he gradually comes round.

It’s twilight so he must have spent the day asleep. Why? Then he remembers the fall and flinches. Wolf is still licking him, and she whines.

He can’t help it, he slides his arms over her and buries his face again in the thick ruff of fur at her neck and he simply cries. It’s all he can do. Accumulated sadness, deep long grief of decades, the memory and loss of Steve—they’ve somehow thawed in the heat of his rage under the ice. He’s not numb anymore. He’s sad, and he’s crying with his friend.

He cries for along time, then lies slumped on her slide, her warmth against and around him. He feels—clean, somehow. New. Fragile as a blown eggshell, but open, his heart soft.

"You would have liked him." He whispers it into her fur, and she licks his cheek.

He can’t travel, not for at least two days. Even with his advanced healing he needs to rest. Wolf pushes him firmly with her nose, and he understands. "Yeah." He needs water, needs fire, and they both need food.

He sits up with difficulty, reviews his position. He needs to clean the shoulder wound again, and stitch it. He lost his second rucksack, and in his first the fire carry coals are soaked. He has strips of frozen fish which he and and the wolf can eat raw, and strips of fat to add to melted snow, a hot drink. He boils a needle and stitches the shoulder closed with the supplies he has, teeth gritted, but none of the pain is worse than what he’s gone through already.

He can think of Steve now. It’s never going to stop hurting, he knows that, but he can think of him and remember him, love him. He’ll hold Steve in his heart and love him with all he has. Hydra took him away, but Steve won’t fade.

Afterward, he sleeps again. As he drowses off, warm against Wolf, he hears the wind pick up. It sounds again like a distant train, winding through high mountains. But he can sleep warm against his friend, heart-sore and heart-easy, full of pain and love.

  
  
  


* * *

He lost a lot of supplies in the ice fall, but two treasures survived. In the days of recovery he nurtures the quenched coal for the ice carry, that moss-wrapped permanent warmth that’s been a solid support throughout his journey. The other treasure is the red quilt he scavenged in Oymyakon, and he strokes it, now, as it dries beside the fire. Wolf is sleeping by his side.

He remembers his family sewing, teasing him, and he knows now who that golden presence was—Steve. And he remembers more: Steve, sick under that very quilt, later, his cheeks flushed and eyes shining, feverish, hectic. He remembers the twisting love and fear of it, Steve ill again and more fragile every time.

Oh, Stevie. Bucky smooths the quilt, bittersweet emotion tightening his throat. Goddamnit, why did you have to come to war? But of course you did. You’d never avoid a fight.

* * *

  
  
Three days later, he hunts with Wolf. As they run together moonlight gleams on the snow, and Bucky remembers standing by a window late at night. A yellow sodium street lamp was shining into the room. They should have closed the curtain, but just for a moment he didn’t, because he was cupping Steve’s face in his hands and Steve was so beautiful, so goddamn beautiful with the golden light on him. Steve was looking back at him, merciless, direct, and Bucky’s heart swelled and he didn’t have words.

The memory blurs into the now, and for a moment Bucky sees it paint the shadows bright: the street lamp and the gold hair under his hands. _Steve_. How could he ever have forgotten his angry, jagged, beautiful fire?

As they hunt, the heat of the memory doesn’t leave him. Steve will never be gone, he touched Bucky’s skin with love and ferocity and it burns in Bucky still. It will not fade. The past is here now, with him.

He’s living in then and now. He’s living in white and gold.

  
  
  



	7. Three Lakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gentleness fills him, dripping in slow, and that night, he dreams of the blue of Stevie’s eyes.

  
  
It’s still freezing, but Bucky can see the first signs of spring. They’re far enough south now that these plains will be meadows in summer and hints of that are creeping in. Delicate Siberian primroses and snowdrops nod against the snow, and Bucky finds reasons to stop, re-fasten his boots, and touch their petals. He uses his metal hand. It’s a gentle defiance: it wasn’t made for this.

  
  


He sees signs of rabbits, squirrels, even bear scat and clawed trees, so he has to be careful now spring is taking hold. But where are the people? The horses? The rest of the wolves? In those terms, the forests are as oddly diminished as everywhere else he’s been since he woke up.

The trees are a boon, though, a rich resource for scores of things he needs: food, medicine, hydration, tools. He’s glad to be back in the forest even if the going is slow and treacherous. Rotten branches crack and fall and decayed wood makes a slippery thick platform under undergrowth. The best strategy is to follow animal tracks since those lead to clearings and water. There’s nothing more dangerous than him in these woods, after all. He doesn’t want to hurt an animal if he isn’t going to eat it, though, so he sings to scare bears away. He’ll sing Christmas carols, show tunes, and on one memorable occasion, Carmen Miranda _._ Startled birds spike into the air and he keeps breaking off to giggle, imagining Steve’s sharp, amused face at Bucky singing.

Now that he’s in the taiga, his routine changes. He gathers sphagnum moss as he walks and dries it at the fire at night, to use as insulation for the fire-carry and bedding. Coniferous forest doesn’t have much edible fungi, and he takes care to avoid the false chanterelles. He’s quite capable of feverish hallucinations already, thanks.

The pine trees are saviors, their sweet astringency a constant companion. Every tree is medicine cabinet, soap, toothpaste, bedding and food. He collects pine needles as he walks and shaves birch bark for the thin sweet white inner leaves for soup. Pine needle tea becomes a nightly luxury, a familiar comfort on his tongue.

* * *

  
  


Lake Baikal. A fifth of the whole planet’s freshwater, vast and astonishing, the far shore a horizon promise of blue-smudged sky. He scrambles down to the shore and it’s like walking up to glass. It’s so clear he can see hundred feet down. Ripples cross the surface and the air is fresh on his cheeks.

He stretches out full-length in the grass, leans on his elbows. For a moment he feels the twist of recognition, of taking the sniper posture, all those hours and years spent coiled to murder, but now he’s here to do something else.

The crushed grass smells sharp, and a green beetle creeps on a bent stem.

Bucky watches the lake for a long time, letting the hugeness of it enter him, change him. His own story is small beside this ancient place. Gentleness fills him, dripping in slow, and that night, he dreams of the blue of Stevie’s eyes.

  
  
  


* * *

He often travels in the dark. It’s safer. He can see relatively well, especially by moonlight, and if the _Podpolkóvnik_ is on his trail he needs to do all he can to make himself hard to track. It’s still slow, the ground treacherous and slippery as he moves across frozen sludge, iced foliage, and the jagged fallen timber here at the outskirts of the taiga.

What he doesn’t expect is–light.

When he sees it on the horizon, he stills. Light means people, but there _aren’t_ any people. He should stay away. Go and case the place in daylight, maybe, when he can see the risks better, or better yet, avoid it entirely, circle wide round it. But if there’s tech to generate that kind of illumination there could be military tech too, scanners. Maybe this place has survivors. It’s a risk. He needs to know more about it.

He climbs the hill and the light grows brighter, a throbbing blue-green- -white gleam, but he still can’t hear any generators. He smells grass and snow but no ozone, no gas. All his senses are alert, straining towards the colors. Then he reaches a gap in the rocks to see through and _oh_.

It’s a pool of light like a surging aurora borealis, swirling colors caught in a bowl of hills. The light laps the boundaries of the rocks, moves like air, like water. Colors whip through it like tides. 

Bucky stares. There’s no sign of human presence, no machinery, no people. Only silence and light and a question in the dark.

The wolf barks twice, clear and loud, and _bounds_ past him. Bucky reaches out to her, but she’s too fast and she’s gone, racing down to the lake of light. Bucky swears, follows, but she’s faster and ahead of him and she plunges into the eerie colors and is gone.

There’s no sound. The lights twist with ferocious energy but the breeze is gentle and the hillside still.

Bucky shouts and he’s scrambling down, falling onto his hip and riding the scree, eyes scouring the lake for any sign of the wolf. There’s nothing. When he gets to the bottom his flesh hand is torn but he doesn’t care. He staggers towards the perimeter of the—phenomenon. That’s the only word for it, and he can’t miss the obvious now: it’s exactly the same borealis-style colour and movement of that thing he saw in the village near the Reka Vitem.

He’s right down in the bowl now, ten feet from it, and the absolute silence of it is so strange: such massive force and visible energy but no sound or pressure. He’s so close now that the light is towering over him, 20 feet high. It cuts off sharply at that point, as if there’s a barrier—no, like there’s an _agreement_.

Why think of that word? But it feels right. Like a—pact between two living things. Pact is the word he thinks of, as he stands by the lake of raging soundless light and feels it as a presence, a force that lives. It’s as if the ground’s breathing out, a vast exhalation of light. No—not the ground, the plants—the blood vines are thick over the valley floor. It’s just like in that village: the vines seem to be making this light, or inviting it.

"Wolf!" It’s pointless shouting, but he has to find her, has to _try_. He stares helplessly into the alien swirl, desperate. Nothing.

Then, thank God, she emerges. She looks unharmed. Bucky’s relief is so sharp he gasps, but she doesn’t leave the phenomenon straight away. She stands at the edge, looks at him, and there’s something strange …. her eyes are shining. Her blue eyes are bright, shining with the same quality as the multicolor vortex.

Bucky doesn’t care. He staggers to her, hugs her neck, and to his astonishment she casually licks his nose. She seems bizarrely relaxed, but yields willingly enough when he keeps tugging her away. When he reaches the top of the hill he glances back, and the light’s still raging, soundless. Solar flares, impossible, in a Siberian valley.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The memory of the lake of light haunts Bucky for weeks, waking him with a jolt in cold darkness, no strange greenblue light except in his mind and dreams. But with time and the passage of miles, it has ebbed into other memories, and now Bucky’s walking down into a very different valley. He's treading soft over green grass, and he’s smiling. Lake Teletskoye stretches ahead of him, fringed, mountains wrapping it on all sides. It’s beautiful.

When Hydra abandoned him in the Altai they dropped him at Mount Bekhal, and he worked his way down to the high lakes and lived in the adjacent forests for months. He never descended as far as the Teletskoye because any tourist destination like that has too many people, its hundred-mile perimeter dotted with cabins. He’s here now, though, and the lake’s between him and the mountains.

He’ll circle the lake, or sail across it if he finds a boat. He has an intuition that he should avoid the north end of the lake, though he couldn’t say why. A memory tugs at him, something about—pain, and metal, and a broad echoing space—but he’s strongly disinclined to think about it. He listens to the instinct and heads south. The cabins to the north end are more plentiful and close together, and the south is far less built up. Less chance of meeting trouble. The wolf races ahead of him along the lake shore. It’s a stunning place, clear blue water, thick conifers, small waterfalls.

As he walks, an idea slowly takes shape. He feels himself smiling.

The lake would freeze, of course, and for a moment he can see the smooth white ice and trees weighted with snow. There’d be trees for firewood, a warm shelter and food stores, and winter would not be a torment. Wind ruffles the blue surface and a bird skims, low. Peace expands in Bucky, around him, warmth on his skin and in his heart. Maybe his journey can stop. 

* * *

He checks each building as he passes, systematic, never assuming that the next one will be empty of people. About one in ten holds skeletons but the rest are empty even of those. Well, when whatever happened happened, most people wouldn’t have chosen a vacation venue. The blood vines are here too, of course, though oddly scarce in the houses. They sprawl over the shores, trailing into the lake.

He’s into the Chelyush Cordon nature reserve when he sees the cabin. It has solid trunks for thick walls and a broad overhang over the entrance to catch snow. Small windows would hold in heat and a good-sized shed alongside could store food laid up against winter. It’s near the shore, but on a slope to protect against flooding during spring thaw, and it has its own jetty for fishing. The trees come down close to it, an ever-ready source of pine. There’s no other building in sight.

Inside, there are three simple rooms: a living area with a sink and kitchen counter in a corner, a big green sofa, empty wooden bookshelves, and a large fireplace. The kitchen cupboards hold cutlery, chipped crockery and beaten-up saucepans. There’s nothing else—no rugs, no possessions. The next room’s a small bathroom with a big white tub, and the third room has a double bed, bare mattress, and a cupboard with sheets, towels, blankets, and a few old pillows. It was probably a holiday rental for people over summer.

Bucky stands against the wall inside and rests his flesh hand on the wood. It’s strong under his palm. This cabin will withstand wind, snow, hail. It’s a refuge.

* * *

  
  


It becomes home the moment he carefully unpacks the fire-carry he’s cherished for so long. New coal each time, new moss, lit each time from the fire of the last, an unbroken torch all the way from Oymyakon to the Altai. Now he doesn’t have to carry it any more. He has a hearth.

He lights the fire and sees the coals settle, warming slowly in the glow. He thinks of the other fires he lit to get here: fires shining against the snow of the ice flats, fires in the shade of the taiga treeline. As the flames curl and whisper he remembers older fires, curled up with Steve in their Brooklyn tenement, huddled for warmth, Steve bony against him, shivering, Bucky pulling him closer—then sweating, skin slick, wrapped together in orange shadow. 

* * *


	8. Homestead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This time last year he was a captive with no home, no memories, no hope. Now he has all three, and a friend.

  
  
Each night he sets snares near the tree-line and he sets fishing traps weekly, and it’s rare they don’t have food in the morning. He fishes in the lake and at the base of a waterfall near the cabin, further into the Chelyush Cordon. His earlier suspicions about the vines seem confirmed, because sections without any vines hardly ever have any fish. Those red plants must be drawn to life in some way.

He uses every piece of the animal, skins for fur, sinews for sewing, bone for needles and fish hooks. He builds an outhouse and a long drop, and sets up a firepit at a safe distance from the house for cooking and for boiling water for drinking and washing. Yellow polar alpine poppies flourish wild on the higher open meadows and he harvests them for seeds for clean lamp oil, bakes leftover pulp into cakes to eat. The wolf doesn’t like them but Bucky savors them, the crunch of poppy sweetness.

He scavenges in the houses further up the lake for fishing gear, clothes, candles, matches, batteries, and string. Those things won’t last so he needs to find his own solutions and he does, making light from string wicks in fat and even—carefully—making soap, mixing ash and animal fat for the lye. At night he repairs clothing and canvas, patching with pine resin and ash.

He’s wary as he walks among the other houses. He knows he’s not safe. The _Podpolkóvnik_ is alive, and who knows who else, and they could find him one day. He has to be ready to run and his go bag is always packed, but he never sees anyone. It’s peaceful.

He boils water morning and night, filtering it through the charcoal that gathers in the Yukon stove. He gathers moss in the forest for insulation, bedding and antiseptic, harvests pine resin when it bleeds from trees, and chops wood to dry and stack in the shed against winter. He collects pine needles for tea and next spring he will tap the birch trees for a drink but now, in late summer, he can feel the first signs of autumn and the ghost of winter ahead.

He’s lonely. Of course he is. He’s busy and he has the wolf as companion, but he has nobody to talk to and, well, he misses Steve. He aches for him, he thinks of him all the time, talks to him, even, until it sometimes feels that Steve’s with him, that he can turn his head and see him at his shoulder.

He digs up tubers in the forest and clamps them in dry bracken, and collects nuts and dries out moss for keeping the stores dry. He saves what fish and meat he can, building a small smokehouse adjacent to the shed to prepare supplies for winter. He smokes it using birch, after a mistake using pine which makes him nauseous, serum or not. It takes a few attempts—the Winter Soldier hardly had masses of experience of long-term homesteading, regardless of experience in palearctic survival. He thinks the wolf looks amused the first time he staggers coughing out of the smokehouse, hair singed.

He rigs up an entrance to the cabin for the wolf to use at will, cutting out a section that she can crawl under and covering it with a triple curtain of blankets to keep in the heat. The place does need repairs. Some of the roof needs patching and bits of the shed wall are decayed, so he digs sod bricks to repair the shed and bolsters the roofs with wood, turf, and resin from the pines. As he does it, he remembers nailing boards over drafty gaps before winter in their Brooklyn tenement, working to keep Stevie warm.

  
  


* * *

He scavenges a lot of things, but most of all he scavenges books. The holiday cabins are full of novels in numerous languages, and he finds he can read English, Russian, Turkish and Italian. He knows he always loved books, especially loved the science fiction pulps, but he remembers that he would read anything and now he devours all he finds—novels, plays, non-fiction, poetry. His empty bookcases slowly fill with books from all the decades he missed. He curls up with the red and blue quilt and reads with wolf wrapped around him. When he’s reading, he’s not so lonely.

The world he glimpses through these is curious. He used to love imagining the future, and grief twists in him when he thinks of this new world’s silence and skeletons. The future wasn’t meant to be like this.

Sometimes he reads aloud to Wolf. it’s strange hearing his own voice, the only human voice he’s heard since he woke, but it nourishes him, too, makes him feel more—solid, somehow. Real. She listens, patient, her blue eyes watchful and her ears swiveled forwards, until she grows bored and runs into the night. Then he follows, and they hunt, and they call to the sky.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The more time goes by, the more he remembers. In the evenings, the silent dead fill his thoughts, all the people he killed—unwillingly, yes, but it was still his hand on the guns, the knives. He whispers his contrition into Wolf’s fur. Wolf licks tears from his face and puts a paw on his arm, but doesn’t try to stop the litany.

Today he’s sitting outside the cabin looking at the river, sadness welling deep inside him as liquid and relentless as any water. He can't make it right. He can't atone. He can't even work to help _other_ people—there is nobody left to help. But maybe—

There’s one thing he can do.

His hands are shaking as he stands up. He walks into the wood, gathers branches, fetches a knife from the cabin. He sits back down by the river.

A man, a political functionary, an ordinary guy, middle aged, pale and shaking. Bucky never knew why he was ordered to kill him, but he did. He remembers his face, the color draining from it, the body falling. He doesn’t know if he had a family, or who cared about him, or what he did to earn execution by the Winter Soldier.

Bucky carves a cross. He’s not sure it’s appropriate, but the symbol feels hedged around with grief and guilt, and it feels right as it takes form under his blade. Then he walks into the woods until he reaches a glade of bluebells and sets the cross there amid the flowers. 

He looks at it.

It’s pathetically inadequate, a stick in a wood with nobody to see it. But he grits his teeth and turns, heads back to the shore. Makes more. A forest of crosses, each carved with solemnity and awareness.

Twigs in the ground. They’re nothing like enough, but they mark that he knows they are gone, and he was responsible.

_I remember all of them._

He can’t make it right, but he can remember them.

* * *

  
  


One book in particular stands out for him: poetry, in English, all about the Altai. It’s written by someone called Nikolas Roerich. The poems aren’t anything like the ones he remembers learning at school with Stevie, like Robert Frost. These ones don’t rhyme but they have a compelling rhythm and he reads them aloud, slowly, needing to taste the words on his tongue. One in particular haunts him.

_"We do not know. But they know._

_The stones know. Even trees_

_Know._

_And they remember."_

The poem speaks to him of something broad and old, an energy and strength he doesn’t recognise and traditions to which he must always be a respectful outsider. He walks in the woods, by the lake, and feels the quiet and strength of the Altai sink deep into his bones. He wants to know it, love it. He hopes that one day, he might understand it better.  
  


* * *

He’s stacking another batch of wood in the storehouse one evening when something cold brushes his neck. He looks up.

Snowflakes are drifting down, thousands of them, quiet and delicate.

Bucky gazes at the sky, heart swelling. They made it. They reached a refuge before winter and they’re prepared, they have what they need. This time last year he was a captive with no home, no memories, no hope. Now he has all three, and a friend.

Wolf barks and she’s jumping through the flurry, every line of her body strong and happy. Joy swells in him, too, and he runs, jumping with her, whirling, playing. He’s laughing and she’s barking and it’s a festival. Snow is falling, but they have a home.

When it gets too cold, they go indoors. Bucky smiles as he unrolls his sleeping bag in front of the fire and adds the red quilt. He nestles back, pulls the quilt towards him, strokes the squares, the stitches. His eyes unfocus as he remembers that other quilt, so long ago, the laughter and love that gathered around it. 

The cabin’s so quiet. Wolf lies down on the other side of the hearth.

He misses them. He misses everyone. The faces unfurl across his memory: his mom and sister, the Howlies, and always always _Steve_ , burned into Bucky’s heart. But at least he remembers them. At least he has a refuge, and a new friend. They’re safe. Things should be okay from here on.

The days unfold, peaceful. All is well.

It’s a shock, then, when lights begin to appear in the forest.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somebody Important is imminent :D


	9. Finding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About a hundred feet away, there’s a man. _Another human being._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by another absolutely incredible art by [Frostbitebakery](https://twitter.com/snoozebuttonfig/status/1083475384463773696?s=20)!

  
  
It begins slowly. At first it’s just twinkles, fleeting enough that Bucky can dismiss them as tricks of reflected moonlight, but three weeks into settling at Teletskoye the lights become unmistakable. There’s something there.

He stands outside the cabin and stares north. It’s _ferocious_ , filling the sky with blue and green, moving, swirling. Whatever’s causing it is powerful, and he’s seen this before.

The colors surge with all the force and strangeness of that earthbound borealis. It has to be the same phenomenon. He didn’t understand it that time either, but at least it wasn’t Hydra _—_ that’s not the threat up there—but even as he thinks that, he grows cold.

The intuition he felt about the north of the lake. Fragments of memory tug at him—something about ... metal, and echoes. The image tastes bitter, fearful.

Bucky fights down his unease, heads back to the cabin. As he closes the door he sees Wolf still outside, standing motionless, staring towards the north. She doesn’t come inside for hours.

* * *

  
  
  


The lights get stranger. Three nights later, Bucky sees a steady gleam in the forest near his house. He reacts instantly. He’s always armed—guns in the thigh holsters, knives everywhere else—so he can move quickly. He melts into the forest.

As he walks, his chest’s tight with dread and frustration. He could leave, could go tonight, but _he doesn’t want to_. This is _home_ , home hard-won, secure against an inevitably brutal winter. He needs to stay. He hefts his hunting knife in one hand, sets his jaw. He’ll neutralize this threat.

He moves among the vine-hung trees, watchful. The light’s nearer now, and it’s growing steadier. He’s about twenty feet away, and he keeps going, then at fifteen feet—

—darkness. The light vanishes, nothing but an afterimage on his retina.

He freezes, listens. Nothing.

He frowns, keeps walking. He doesn’t move his gaze from the spot where it was. Every sense he has is straining in the dark, but when he reaches it, there’s nothing there, just the inevitable vines hanging thick and meaty across the tree boughs.

Frustration surges hot in his throat. No equipment, no people. Not even marsh gasses that could explain some optical phenomena, and besides, the light was too bright and steady for that. _Goddamnit_. He slams his metal hand against a tree. He can’t assess the threat. He should evacuate immediately, take his go-bag and run. But— _no_. It’s that defiant core that saved him, that rose up against despair under the Arctic ice, and now, again, he feels the _no_ in his heart like a kernel, a deep, true diamond. What he has here is precious. He’s not going to keep running. He’ll stay, and watch, and defend the shelter if he can.

The frustration’s ebbed to a smolder, a burning, determined thing that can last a long time. Bucky narrows his eyes, and raises his knife. He’ll mark this tree, return in daylight. He’ll search the forest. He’ll solve this.

What to carve? Two lines slashed in a cross. _No_.

When he gets back to the cabin, he closes his shutters to hide the light and smothers the fire. It’s pointless really, since the smoke’s been broadcasting his location for months, but he’ll re-assess tomorrow. As he quashes the flames, though, he notices something odd. Wolf is lying by the fire absolutely relaxed, awake, peaceably watching the flames.

"Hey, pal." Bucky’s puzzled. Surely she’d have sensed something, seen the lights, but she’s relaxed. She blinks at him placidly, _hruffs_ in seeming mild annoyance when he smothers the rest of the fire, but apparently not bothered enough to move.

"Sorry, pal. Those lights. Gonna keep a low profile til I can— you’re really not worried." He marvels, shrugs, rolls out his bedding. Best to get to sleep now before the cabin loses its heat.

As he drowses off he watches her, her blue eyes open. He feels he’s missing a clue, something important. It takes a long time for him to fall into fitful sleep.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Echoes and metal and a dark, wide place. Its not like the Arctic bunker; this is … _nearer_.

Bucky’s moving through it like he’s a puppet but something tugs at him. Look up, up. _There_. The RT-20P 9K99 intercontinental ballistic missile. Death in 13 tonnes of steel, uranium and delicate, lethal mechanism.

He stares and the dark around him grows darker while the missile shines. Calls him.

* * *

He chokes awake, his heart pounding.

He can tell that a few hours have passed. The cabin’s cold, and the wolf’s gone as usual, nocturnal as she is. He shifts in his sleeping bag, pulls the red and blue quilt tighter around him, and his panic ebbs to something quieter, more helpless. He had been so sure he was choosing a safe place, but for god’s sake, he’s not far from an old missile silo. Is he ever going to stop following old paths, grooves in his mind laid before he had freedom?

He flinches, cuddles himself closer in the quilt. Tries to comfort himself in the silent dark.

* * *

  
  
The next day he scours the forest, starting at the marked tree and sweeping the wood systematically, east and west, north and south. Hours of fruitless searching, and he slumps on a rock. Nothing.

Wolf has been trailing after him for the last few hours, seeming rather more playful than invested. He watches her. Right now she’s sniffing about the base of a tree particularly well-draped with the vines. Her ears are flipped forward like she’s listening. She doesn’t look at all wary or troubled by whatever these lights are about. Bucky sighs and heads back to the cabin.

He keeps living as he was, with one change: daily patrols in the forest, looking, looking, for any sign of threat. _Who are you? What makes the light?_ No answer from the conifers. Just silence and snow.

He remembers a poem he had to learn at school with Stevie.

_"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,_

_But I have promises to keep,_

_And miles to go before I sleep,_

_And miles to go before I sleep."_

 _No._ He grits his teeth. The promises he made were to Stevie and walking won’t help those. He’s making another promise, one to himself. He deserves a home and he’ll fight to keep it.

* * *

His resolve stays firm. He sets up nets for the ice fishing, and builds an ice box from sticks and snow to store fresh meat. He cares for the cabin, boils and filters water, repairs his gear, keeps the rhythms of the day. He watches the forest.

* * *

  
  
A few weeks later, he leaves the cabin in the early dawn and sees the wolf standing, ears pricked forward, tail high. She’s gazing north. Huh. She’d normally be drowsing, now, after a night of running, but she looks absolutely alert— _poised_ , is the word. 

"You want to hunt? In daylight?" It doesn’t compute.

She _rhuffs_ , scrapes a paw on the ground. She seems impatient, then she bounds past him into the cabin and emerges with his go-bag between her teeth.

Bucky’s startled. She’s seen him take this before, but only when he’s planning to be away from the cabin overnight, perhaps on a scavenging expedition to a distant lakeside settlement. He’s never taken it hunting, so that can’t be what this is about.

"Not hunting, huh." He hefts the bag onto his shoulder, slowly, "Okay. I trust you, pal. Lead the way."

He trails her on the lake-shore, then up into the nearby woods. She knows so much more than he does about so many things. She is a creature of the snow even more than he is. He’ll listen to her.

She strikes out due north, and he follows, wary.

* * *

She seems unusually focused, not pausing, or distracted by animal tracks. It’s entirely unnatural behavior, not least for being diurnal. Bucky wonders, but keeps going.

After three hours he pauses to drink water and eat the dried fish he routinely maintains in the go-bag, but Wolf seems impatient to keep onward. She whines and butts her head against his knees, imperious—gets him up, gets him moving again.

Another two hours of walking and Bucky’s curiosity is turning to impatience. They are well into flat shrubland now, with little cover. 

"Hey, pal." 

Wolf’s about twenty feet ahead of him and she doesn’t look back, but she stops walking. He’s about to call again when he sees why she stopped.

About a hundred feet away, there’s a man. _Another human being_.

Bucky goes still.

The man looks ragged, a mess. His face is covered with snow goggles and scarf and he’s in white arctic tac gear, but it looks patched, sewn up. He isn’t moving. He’s clearly staring at Bucky and Wolf but he’s making no move to reach a weapon. He isn’t defended at all.

Bucky reaches behind himself to rest his metal hand on the hunting knife in his rucksack, but it’s a move made from head rather than heart. Oddly, he doesn’t feel threatened. Wolf is under his flesh hand, and she doesn’t seem wary either. In fact, she whines, and takes a step forward, looking back at him. Her blue eyes seem to be shining.

He’s baffled, looks at her, then back at the man. She’s not retreating.

Bucky wonders how he himself appears to this man. Dark fabric, hooded, a scarf, and a wolf. The wolf, at least, should be making the man nervous, but he doesn’t look it.

He swallows. Nothing else for it. He needs to get closer, find out who this is. His own steps sound suddenly loud, even through the soft overshoes, and the man’s still not moving. Bucky pauses about five feet away, and something makes him remove his snow goggles, pull down his scarf.

The man gasps. Pulls down his own scarf, pulls off his goggles, his hat, and Bucky sees his face. His _impossible_ face. It’s _Steve_.

The shock of it blooms in Bucky’s chest like fire. He staggers back, nearly falls, but he can’t look away. Steve’s hair is longer on top, and he has a rough beard. He looks older, but only five years, maybe? Nothing like as old as he should …

The amazement turns to grief, sharp as any ice. No. Steve must have died decades before. If he survived the War, he’d have died by now. He wouldn’t look like this. And how the hell would he be here, of all places, in a random remote part of Siberia? Bucky’s hallucinating. He’s been indulging too much in memory and now his mind is starting to slip the edges.

Instinctively, without taking his eyes off the man, Bucky reaches out his right hand to his side, trembling, and almost instantly Wolf’s fur is under his fingers, her warmth and presence strong beside him. This isn’t a dream.

So. There’s a man here, and it isn’t Steve. It’s someone who looks … exactly like him. Even as he tells himself that, his mind and body ache to believe.

Bucky shakes his head. "Who are you?"

The man’s face crumples. He opens his mouth, seems to try to speak. Can’t. Tries again. 

"Bucky?"

The question is a blow. _Steve_ —is there, holding him, and he’s warm and real. Bucky can smell him, his beard is rough on his cheek, his jacket is scraping him, bulky, he can hear him _breathe_.

"Are you real." Steve’s muttering. "Are you real." He’s shaking. All that massive strength, the coiled ferocity of him, and Bucky clings back, and time is rushing through them, decades of separation and grief, but Bucky’s warm and thawing. His cheeks are wet.

If this is a dream it’s the only one he ever wants.

  
  


[ ](https://twitter.com/snoozebuttonfig/status/1083475384463773696?s=20)

  
  


The hike back takes 5 hours and Steve doesn’t say much, not letting go of Bucky, staring at him, incredulous. _Starving_ for him, and Bucky feels the same. They hold each other the entire way, an arm flung over shoulders, hands gripped, and keep turning to look at each other. Steve can’t seem to speak yet, and Bucky has a thousand questions burning on his tongue, but he also has a profound sense that he needs to get Steve to shelter before he asks—and, anyway, words aren’t what Bucky craves most. It’s touch. Over and over, verifying the truth of him. Like St Thomas in the Bible, Bucky needs skin under his hands. 

This isn’t Steve as he remembers him. This isn’t the Steve of the Front, entirely uncompromising and unbreakable, or even the Stevie of Brooklyn, equally determined even if his body couldn’t cash the checks his heart kept writing. This Steve is—Bucky’s mind stutters over the word. _Damaged_.

Fear’s uncoiling in Bucky, a terrible shiver. He can’t comprehend Steve is here with him, but there’s no time for awe. Steve’s clearly at snapping point, has gone through something so terrible that his usual astonishing resilience isn’t shrugging it off. This is an emergency. This is about destruction.

Bucky has to help, and he’s not the only one. Wolf is on the other side of Steve and sometimes brushes her head under his hand. Wolf is showing Steve no hostility and seems to have forgotten her odd mission north. Unless—she _brought_ him here?

No. Bucky shoves the impossible idea to one side. Think about that later. They need to get Steve home.

* * *

  
  


When they reach the cabin, Bucky puts Steve on the couch under blankets to rest for a while, and starts the fire. Wolf lies in front of the cabin door as if on guard, ears alert. Bucky starts making pine needle tea because Steve surely needs the simple comfort of a warm drink. Steve’s quiet while he does it, the only sound in the cabin the whisper of flame. Bucky glances over. Steve’s obviously exhausted but is fighting sleep, still watching Bucky avidly, desperate, like he can’t believe he’s real.

Well. Bucky sure understands that. He’s desperate to know what’s happened, how can Steve be _here_ , and it’s an effort to focus on the practical thing, the pouring of water, the mug. Every centimetre of space between him and Steve feels too far. It’s a relief when he can bring it to the couch, settle against Steve, arm around him, re-establish that impossible contact. Touch him. 

"Drink it, sweetheart." Bucky speaks low, like to someone wounded, because Steve clearly _is_ , through some experience deep and terrible. Whatever it was can’t have been a single catastrophe since Steve always shrugged those off. This would have taken years, a grinding, relentless despair.

Steve takes the mug and sips, and Buck can’t wait any longer. "What happened, Steve? How can you—how are you even _here?_ " _How can you be alive? How have you lived this long, how can you have found me? None of this can be possible, but you’re here_.

"God, Buck. It sounds crazy. After you," his face twists, "after you … fell, I kept going. It … it wasn’t great," and Bucky can see it, Steve’s grief and rage too huge for a mere World War to contain it. "In the end I didn’t last much longer anyway. I had to—there was a plane." He closes his eyes. "I put it down in the Arctic."

Bucky’s eyes widen. He’s starting to see the shape of it. "You _crashed a plane_."

"I had to, Buck." Steve’s eyes are open again and yes, that’s the searing sincerity of Steve Rogers, right there, and mingled relief and exasperation floods Bucky at the sight of it. "Was a nuclear payload. Millions of people would have died if I hadn’t. And anyway—" he looks away again, his shoulder stiffening under Bucky’s arm. "I survived too."

Bucky’s heart lurches with dread. "How."

And now Steve’s looking nack at him with compassion, deep sadness. "I froze."

 _Ice_. So Steve knows cold and eternity too. Panic fills Bucky, but no—Steve wasn’t tortured, wasn’t made a puppet, unless— "Steve. _Who found you_."

Steve covers his hand instantly with his own, warm and huge, soothing, _protective_ , and the gesture suddenly makes Bucky wonder how much Steve knows about _him_. That unease only grows when Steve replies, uncharacteristically gently. "Not—not Hydra, Bucky," and at the words Bucky has to close his eyes. He’s flooded with shame. So Steve knows who had him, must know the terrible thing Bucky became.

But Steve’s still talking. "About nine years ago, American soldiers found me and took me home, thawed me out, and," he spreads his arms wide, "there I was, in a very goddamn different New York City."

Bucky flinches. He himself saw time shifts in jumps—two or three years, five, a decade—and even then it was hard to adjust. Steve had that transition in an onslaught.

"It was hard." The admission’s soft. "But there were good people. Sam Wilson—they call him the Falcon—he’s amazing, a veteran. Ex-pararescue, they’re paratrooper special ops, medics. Hell, he flies with a _rocket_ pack." Steve meets Bucky’s gaze directly, with the faintest of grins. It’s the first time Bucky’s seen a hint of a smile on his face since he found him. "I swear, Buck, when I saw it, I thought of your dime novels." He glances at the near-full bookshelves. "I guess you reading hasn’t changed, huh." His eyes are wondering when he looks back at Bucky. "How did you get all this together?"

Bucky shrugs, but doesn’t take the distraction. "So you had a team?"

A shadow crosses Steve’s face. "Yeah. We were called the Avengers. The name wasn’t my choice. That was Nick—he brought us together, Sam, Tony Stark, he’s Howard’s kid, Clint, he’s an archer, and Thor, he’s, uh," Steve shifts awkwardly, "He’s a kind of Viking. Bruce Banner, he’s a scientist, and Natasha, a spy and a fighter." His voice is stronger. Listing his team mates is warming Steve more than the fire.

Bucky nods, thoughtful. "Kinda different team from the Howlies."

Steve smiles faintly again. "Yeah. Well. Similarities. One big missing piece." He looks at Bucky again, his gaze still hungry.

There’s so much more to ask, not least what the hell happened to the world, but first Bucky just has to know, "Steve. How are you _here_?"

Steve looks away, and his big hand comes up to rub the back of his neck. "Well."

Bucky’s eyes narrow, and he straightens, the blanket falling from his own shoulders. "Cough it up, Steve."

Steve’s gazing out at the falling snow. "We got intel. Bucky. I got intel." His eyes meet Bucky’s again, and now there’s desperation in them. "About you. That you’d—survived, that they had you in Siberia." He sets his jaw.“I was in Siberia 48 hours later.”

Exasperated fondness fills Bucky in a wave. "Fucksake, Steve. Azzano _again_?"

Steve flushes, scowls and opens his mouth, but Bucky’s on a roll. "Just throw yourself into hostile territory _alone, again, for me_?" Then the full realization hits him. "Jesus, Steve, what did you give up? What did you _leave_? Where the hell is your team?"

"Yeah." Steve’s face is gray again and he looks exhausted, as if remembering his team can hurt as well as warm. "They helped me. I couldn’t be here without them. Natasha, she was, well, she was Red Room—" The word is a slice of recognition and Bucky stiffens, but Steve lifts one palm, quick, placatory. "She defected. She got the intel on you, I’d never have found out you were even still alive without her. And Sam—" Steve’s face twists, painful. "He offered to come and help me look for you. Find you. But I said he had to stay. There needed to be a Captain America and, well—" Steve’s gives a weary smile, and mimes hanging up the shield onto his back. "Was time to hand that over." A pause. "Plus he can fly. Pretty cool."

Thank God Steve’s at least dropped the shield, but it’s not like he’ll stop being reckless. "What happened?"

Steve’s face crumples for a moment. "Well. I knew it would be a long shot. We knew you were in Siberia in the late nineties and had relatively secure data on you still being there around 2009, but we didn’t know exactly where. We had intel on some bases, including something up here in the north, and I was just gonna go to all of them." Steve’s set his jaw in that determined expression Bucky knows so well. "It seemed most likely to be a base near Novosibirsk, so I went there first. Then …" he trails off.

Bucky bites his lip. "Then things went wrong."

"Yeah." Steve leans forward, elbows on his knees and rests his cheeks on his palms, closes his eyes. "Yeah." The gray exhaustion is back. Bucky’s never seen him this shattered.

"It can wait, Steve." Bucky speaks gently. "It’s not like we have to debrief for an op or anything." 

It’s a joke, really. There aren’t any more ops left for either of them now, and Steve gives a sad snort of laughter. "I guess not."

Bucky moves around the shelter, gets what he needs. "Right. You take the sleeping bag."

"What?" Steve pulls himself out of his daze, notices Bucky’s laden with blankets. "No, I don’t need—"

"Shut up and lie down, Rogers."

Steve’s jaw wobbles, and his eyes are wet. Mother of Mercy, the stubborn bastard yields for once. He lies on the sleeping bag and Bucky tucks blankets around him, over him, and over the very top he settles the red and blue one that reminded him of Sarah. Steve recognizes it too, chokes. "Bucky."

"Shhhh." Bucky is curled up beside him, around him, and stroking his hair. "We sleep now. That’s all." And Steve’s so deeply tired, so utterly drained, that he does.

Bucky lies beside him, holding him. It’s so quiet in the cabin, the low light of the oil lamp gleaming on the wooden walls. He thinks about what it must have been like for Steve, in Siberia, and alone, when whatever happened—happened—and all the people died or left, and the satellites went silent. Steve kept going though, not just surviving, but searching. Searching for Bucky.

Bucky presses his face into Steve’s hair, and his heart is so full of love and grief he can hardly breathe. Steve keeps sleeping.

Bucky half-smiles, sad. All it took for Steve Rogers to accept comfort is the end of the world.

  
  


* * *


	10. Tell the Story of the End of the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Explicit rating]
> 
> They move together, frost on the windows and fire between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A playlist is on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3nuCCH5UyHWP00xzPMgnmj?si=P_6pvY6oT7KOYQDB5Ul3Zg) and [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dg32rRxIVZzypaTWDi1AW9d79j-Ry3D) :D

  
  
  
  


Steve’s been asleep for a long time, and Bucky’s already up and collecting snow for water. He’s out of the cabin in the grey dawn, melting the water over the firepit, when Wolf comes over, greets him with a nudge against his knees. Bucky strokes the thick fur at her neck, and wonders.

He kneels down in front of her, on one knee. She’s so big that she’s almost eye level to him. "Hey."

She flips her ears forwards and jerks her head, but doesn’t look away.

"You led me to him. I know you did. How did you know where he was? How did you know _any_ of this?"

Wolf looks at him, her clever eyes clear.

Bucky persists. "How did you know? Who he was? That he was near?"

Wolf takes a step towards him, cuffs his shoulder with her head, nuzzles his collar briefly, then walks off.

Bucky stays on one knee in the snow, watching her move away, and now he’s smiling. Another mystery, then. For once, though, it’s a mystery with kindness.

  
  
  


* * *

"What happened, Steve." It’s time to find out.

He and Steve are eating breakfast inside by the fire, a meal of rabbit, dried fish and pine tea. Wolf is asleep by the door. Steve seems stronger, even if he’s still looking at Bucky just this side of devouring. At the question he straightens, looks resolute, and Bucky recognizes the move. This is debriefing. Steve won’t be sharing much of himself.

"The SSR changed after the war, became an organization called SHIELD, a covert government agency. Peggy and Howard lead it to start with, but by the time I woke up it was a big organization, new leaders. Nick Fury ran it, but it reported to the Secretary of State. Alexander Pierce." A faint line appears between Steve’s eyebrows. "I didn’t see him often. The Avengers Initiative was a project in SHIELD especially concerned with extreme global threat, like alien invasion. Which, uh, actually happened. New York City got pretty beaten up, but we won. Well." He runs a hand through his hair. "We worked for SHIELD, but we were getting suspicious, so Tony and Nat hacked the system."

Steve clenches his fists. "They found blueprints for airships that would have been able to take out thousands of people every second. Gotta say, Buck, it looked a hell of a lot like fascism in the making to me. Tony leaked the plans to the press and there was a media outcry. SHIELD said it was just brainstorming by a rogue internal group and nothing came of it, but we still didn’t trust them. We kept an eye on them, kept hacking their systems. That’s how we found out about the virus."

Bucky’s attention sparks. "Virus?"

"Well. Initially nobody was sure what it was. SHIELD was getting reports about parts of Russia and sub-Saharan Africa having strange deaths. SHIELD didn’t seem officially involved, but it had a lot of reports about it long before it went public. I mean, it couldn’t be kept under wraps for long. God, Buck." Steve’s face is agonised. "It attacked flesh, nerve, bone, everything. It wasn’t a disease. It was disassembly." He’s speaking precisely, raw rage in every syllable.

"We didn’t know what it was for weeks. There were a lot of theories. Some people thought it was a weaponized respiratory virus. Others said it must be a toxin through a distribution vector like a local water supply. It might even have had an aural component, a sound, something deep, subsonic. Nobody could prove anything, but—"

"Weaponized?" Bucky’s voice is sharp.

Steve nods grimly. "Exactly. All the analysts agreed the spread didn’t follow a usual epidemic dispersal pattern. It was place-specific assault, targeted to cities and nations. After a few months it spread, sure, but initially the focus was limited by political boundaries in ways a natural virus wouldn’t." Steve’s voice is cold fury, his eyes haunted, and Bucky wonders what horrors he isn’t yet telling.

"Bruce called it ‘recombinant DNA’ and ‘nanotech’. He and the scientist Helen Cho were trying to work it out when I left. But Bruce said that at the level it was coding, it wouldn’t just be affecting humans. It could be mammals, other life forms, even, ultimately, bacteria. Anything with genetic information was potentially vulnerable. Tony showed me some science fiction story about everyone melting into, like, plastic. And this thing was _made_." _There,_ the savagery that Bucky remembers in Steve, a sword of pure frustration.

Bucky stares at the flames. The vision Steve is evoking is appalling. "No heroics left. Everyone failed." He’s quiet a moment and the fire rustles in the grate. "This is aftermath."

Steve’s lip curls, bitter. "Yeah."

Bucky imagines the stuff slowly sinking into the earth, the sea, the sky. Life everywhere, unfolding. "But only people went."

Steve glances at him, wry. "Yeah? Sure of that, are you?" He looks at Wolf. "I’ve seen very few wolves and horses. Bears seem more scarce too. So far it seems to most affect larger mammals."

Steve scrunches his eyes closed, and his massive shoulders sag. He looks so tired. "And the people. I couldn’t help them, Buck." His voice is low. "I saw so many die. The governments could have helped some of them, but they didn’t. They barred themselves in and shut out the screams and—" Steve’s fists are clenched.

The atrocity is too much to even imagine, and suddenly the solitude around them in unbearable to Bucky in a way he’s managed to ignore for months. "Did it take everyone? Is there really nobody left?" His voice sounds small to himself.

Steve looks sad, and deeply tired. "I don’t know, Buck. Maybe there are. And maybe this thing changes, you know, maybe it morphs into less lethal forms. But whatever it does has permanently changed ecosystems. And I haven’t been able to get in touch with my team for—" He breaks off.

"Steve." Bucky says it slowly, a terrible suspicion building. "How long have you been here in Siberia by yourself."

Steve doesn’t reply.

Bucky stares at him, horror starting to mount. "Steve. _How long_."

Steve lifts his chin, looks straight at him. "The virus emerged five and a half years ago. I found out you were alive six month later, and came to Siberia to search for you. The satellites went down within 2 weeks of me getting here." His voice scrapes hoarse. "I’ve been alone here for five years."

* * *

Steve’s been asleep for about ten hours. It’s as if, now that he’s found Bucky, his body is finally saying _rest_. Bucky can’t imagine how devastating those long years alone would have been. Only a person with relentless determination and superhuman resilience could have endured it after such tragedy. Bucky imagines the shock of waking in a new century, then the agony of losing everyone all over again.

So Bucky’s doing what he can. He’s boiling water at the firepit, using all the pans he has, then calmly ferrying each to the big tub in the cabin. By the time Steve stirs awake the bathroom’s full of steam and there’s a hot bath ready.

Steve’s astonishment at the luxury is heart-tugging. He still seems dazed and uncharacteristically compliant, the years of solitude, starvation and shock creating a brief pause in even Steve Rogers’ relentless drive. He even lets Bucky help him undress. He’s thinner than he should be, his ribs exposed, which makes grim sense. After all, getting enough calories to fuel his serum-enhanced body is hard even for Bucky, and has to be the primary focus of his entire daily routine. Steve, on the other hand, never even set up a homestead, instead searching for him, over and over, relentless. Tears prick Bucky’s eyes as he thinks of it. Goddamnit, Steve.

He folds Steve’s shirt and turns back to see him leaning over the bath, running his hands in the water. He looks incredulous, attentive. Bucky can see his back, now, and the sight hits him like a blow.

Steve’s left shoulder is scarred.

Bucky stills.

He knows what it takes to make Steve’s body scar. Hardly anything leaves a permanent mark on him, he remembers that from the War, and he knows his own body is the same. But Steve _is_ scarred, and Bucky knows exactly who could do that, the people who have mastered the kinds of repeated, merciless pain involved. They’re the same people who would inflict that mark.

It’s a stylized, incomplete, deep-carved octopus.

Bucky doesn’t say anything. He lays out the towels he found, and leaves Steve to soak and rest. He smiles at Steve as he stands at the bathroom door. Then outside the cabin, in the snow, he buries his face in Wolf’s fur and weeps.

* * *

Later that evening, he does ask. He has to.

They’re curled up on the couch, by the fire, under three blankets, and Bucky says, "You found them, didn’t you. Hydra."

Steve’s grip around Bucky’s shoulder tightens, but he doesn’t reply immediately. Then, "Yeah. They had me for a bit, down at a bunker near Kubovaya."

Bucky closes his eyes. In his worst nightmares he never thought of Steve falling into Hydra’s hands. The knowledge is unbearable. He needs to keep a lid on it, he has to help Steve, but his thoughts are a storm and he’s shaking.

"Hey," Steve’s voice is soft. "It’s okay. I got out. It was only a couple of weeks. I’ve been through worse, Bucky. We’re okay, we’re _okay_ ," and now they’re holding each other, clinging like on a raft, saving each other. Neither is drowning, not any more. They’re together.  
  
  


* * *

  
  


Over the next few days, Bucky shows Steve around the shelter, the domestic things he’s made, the routines of care he’s nurtured. They talk. Bucky learns Peggy died seven years ago, but that she had a life full of happiness. A life well lived.

Bucky thinks about that as he retrieves firewood. Steve sounded pensive when he said it, another word Bucky would never have thought would ever fit Steve. He’s changed. They both have. Bucky looks at his metal hand as he stacks the wood, and smiles without mirth.

Steve hasn’t asked Bucky about what happened to him all those years. Bucky thinks Steve already knows a lot about it, though, maybe even more than Bucky does—that Red Room hacker probably found salient data _—_ but Bucky doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s still too raw, too terrible. He’s ashamed.

Better to stay focused on small things, gentle things. The little details of their new, shared life.

* * *

  
  


They’re shoveling snow away from the cabin and the vines have are tangled in it, streaking it like blood. "These vines," Steve mutters. "Can’t work them out. Why do they like the snow so much."

Bucky stops dead. "What?"

Steve looks at him, blank. "Haven’t you noticed? They like cold places."

" _Cold_? But—" Bucky fumbles with what he thought he knew. "They like _life_ , they grow where there were people and fish and—" he gestures to the thin traces around the shrub, "other plants."

Steve shrugs. "Sure, and there were a hell of a lot more of them in Novosibirsk, that I can say. But I only ever saw them after I got here, and they only started that very first winter."

Bucky gazes at the blood vines that trail thick into the lake. "So they weren’t part of the cause, the—virus."

"Hmm? No. The vines came—" Steve heaves another shovel of snow from the path, "after. When everything was—finished." His jaw tenses and he keeps his eyes on the task.

Bucky frowns. This doesn’t make sense. The vines are definitely more plentiful around living things, that’s a fact, so it’s always seemed obvious that they must want to … prey on life. All the signs seemed to be that they were the reason people died. The red marks on that map in the village, too. That seemed like evidence.

Bucky feels he’s been given another clue, but he can’t see where it fits yet.

  
  


Later, they’re curled up in the cabin on the sofa, the wolf stretched alongside. They’re wrapped up and cosy, in a double embrace. Bucky’s thinking about what Steve said earlier: _that first winter_.

He imagines it, those devastating months when Steve would have been wandering Siberia alone, wondering why the lights were going out, losing his satellite uplink, losing contact with his _friends_ , and then surrounded by the dead. "Steve," Bucky breathes, and pulls Steve tight against him, achingly sorry. "You goddamn palooka. You shoulda stayed there, in Brooklyn."

Steve doesn’t disengage but leans his head back enough to see Bucky’s face, and his answering smile is lopsided, wry. Honest. "I had to find you, Buck."

The stubborn jerk. Bucky slaps his palm hard against Steve’s chest. Steve laughs under his breath, but he doesn’t look away. They’re so close. Steve looks—tired, older, small wrinkles at the edges of his eyes.

Silence spreads between them. Bucky doesn’t want to take his hand away. Steve’s chest is so firm and warm beneath his palm. Bucky swallows, desire unfurling at the base of his spine, so sweet and sharp, so long forgotten.

Steve’s eyes are darkening, intense, but his arms don’t move from around Bucky. Those crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen as he smiles, and he draws one hand up gently, slowly, cups Bucky’s face, caresses his cheekbone with his thumb. "God, Bucky. I missed you."

Steve’s utter sincerity makes Bucky’s throat tighten. He can’t speak, can’t move, his whole world caught in the blue of Steve’s eyes. Steve raises his eyebrows infinitesimally. It’s a question. And Bucky closes his eyes and answers it, leaning up to brush his lips against Steve’s.

That first contact is electric, wildfire. Steve’s mouth is the same and so is the way he kisses—hungry _greedy_ , absolutely in charge. Bucky’s mouth opens, it can’t not, desperate to be filled and they’re gasping against each other now, hands sliding under shirts, stroking skin.

They pull apart for breath, both half-laughing, shocked by the joy of it, the playfulness. Bucky’s giddy and a grin is lingering on Steve’s face and the familiarity is a sweetness and a pain, at once—echoes of their lost youth, remembered laughter, joy.

Steve stands, holds out his hand, and Bucky lets himself be pulled up. Steve’s studying him in the firelight. "Bed?" It’s a question. He’s being careful.

 _"God,_ yes," Bucky’s fervent, and Steve chokes a surprised laugh as Bucky stumbles up, grabs their blankets, and pulls Steve after him into the bedroom.

They heap their blankets and sleeping bags on the bed, then look at each other. The ease and laughter of a few moments ago has ebbed into a tender awkwardness. Bucky swallows, and meets Steve’s eyes.

Steve’s eyes crinkle. and Bucky knows he feels it too. “Sweetheart,” and that word breathed from Steve’s lips is enough to make Bucky’s hesitation melt.

“C’mon, Rogers,” and Bucky climbs under the covers, still clothed--it’s too cold to undress outside the bed, that wastes heat, and Steve of course knows that too, curls his bulk under the same blankets.

Undressing beside each other is strange but enchanting. They both move slowly, careful not to dislodge the blankets or waste any warmth, but the proximity is already intoxicating. The need to be close thrums through them, a tangible heat.

Moving into Steve’s arms, against his body, is _astonishing_. Steve’s so strong, so powerful, but Bucky knows how deeply lonely and hurt he’s been and is flooded with a longing to soothe. "Hey," he murmurs, "Close your eyes, Stevie."

He does, a tiny line between his brows, and Bucky takes the edge of the softest of the blankets and brushes Steve’s cheek.

Steve goes entirely still.

Bucky brushes it again, gently, across the curve of his jaw, over his beard, his cheek, under his eyes, his ear. Steve makes an inarticulate sound and turns his face into the soft fabric. Bucky’s chest aches and he remembers the shock of relief at the gentle touch. That textile tenderness.

Bucky’s acutely aware of Steve’s body against his, his knee bent and partly wedged between Bucky’s legs, his warm, thick arms around Bucky’s shoulders, the pulse at his neck. Steve pulls back just enough for Bucky to see his expression, so loving, so tender. Those hints of age lines are so strange to see on Steve’s face, markers of time and his ordeal, but even now Steve’s so focused on _him_. His intensity is overwhelming.

Steve smooths Bucky’s hair from his forehead. "I love you, Bucky." It’s so soft it’s hardly a breath, but his intense expression reinforces it. Bucky’s heard Steve say that so many times before, but in some ways this feels like it’s the first. Bucky’s eyes are wet but he doesn’t look away. Steve sees, and his mouth quirks, and he kisses Bucky’s forehead, looks at him again, still hungry. "You’re," Steve swallows visibly, runs his hand gently over Bucky’s hair. It’s so quiet in the cabin. "You’re beautiful."

Bucky is so startled he can’t help but laugh, and _oh_ , what sweetness, a bright, improbable sound. Steve’s eyes widen. Bucky can’t help it, the fondness and love in him is overwhelming, and he tilts his head back, hoods his eyes, and touches his tongue to his top lip—unabashed, flirtatious. "Quite the charmer there, Rogers."

Steve narrows his eyes, his whole demeanor sharpening, and Bucky feels his own body loosen, his mouth go dry. When Steve kisses him now there’s nothing gentle about it.

There are no clothes between them, just skin and sweat, and Steve pushes his knee further, parts Bucky’s thighs. Bucky’s getting hard and Steve’s even harder, his cock already wet at the tip, and they grind, instinctive. They’re like teenagers again, rubbing against each other, though it’s a hell of a lot colder than Brooklyn. As they move together, breathless, Bucky remembers moving with Steve like this under blankets in winter, frost on the windows and fire between them. The weather’s colder but Steve’s warmth hasn’t changed

"God, Steve," Bucky’s near delirious, he needs to touch him, "can I — can we—" and they both _need_ it, their movements urgent, and Steve’s thick and hot in his hand.

Steve shudders as soon as Bucky touches him, his whole powerful frame convulsing. When his hands find Bucky in turn, Bucky gasps and arches back, thrusting up into Steve’s grip, helpless, lost. Everything’s shrunk to this, Steve working him, Bucky holding Steve, their bodies moving and their blood singing. Steve’s hand is relentless and Bucky unspools under it, wet and aching, thrusting, sobbing. Steve whispers, "Honey, let go, Buck, please," and he does, he _does_ , healed in the white light of it _,_ home.  
  
  



	11. Warm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Steve sees it—when he sees how Bucky and wolf hunt, two not-human things as a lethal team—he pulls Bucky into the kind of kiss that Bucky could live off, the kind of kiss saints in the desert could have fasted on for years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Explicit rating]
> 
> "Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.  
> These, our bodies, possessed by light.  
> Tell me we’ll never get used to it."
> 
> \- [Richard Siken](https://twitter.com/sikenpoems/status/1116571029592141824).

  
  


Steve adjusts quickly to the rhythms of the cabin’s life, melting snow, catching fish and game, patrolling the forest. Right now it’s early evening, and they’re relaxing by the outdoor fire. They’ve finished eating (hare, tonight, and foraged greens) and Bucky’s sharpening his knives.

Steve brightens when he sees Bucky’s Gerber center-drive. "Gorgeous." He sounds envious as Bucky tilts the wickedly sharp instrument, firelight gleaming off the blades. "I had the Leatherman multi-function. It was hard when I lost it. And other gear. I had to improvise. I got, uh, good at sewing." He indicates his patches, the scars of thick sailcloth-needle.

"You’re lucky you survived." Bucky’s frank. Steve’s always been clever and resourceful and he probably got training in palearctic survival before coming, but it’s still formidable that he’s made it this far. Serum or not, you don’t fuck around with the palearctic. "Seriously, Steve, why didn’t you just hole up somewhere? Settle in, make a homestead?" Bucky has his hand outstretched, and Wolf has come up by him, her fur warm under his palm. That’s what he and Wolf had done, after all. They’d made a home, something safe for themselves, but Steve hadn’t done that, and a kind of baffled, affectionate exasperation surges in Bucky’s throat, makes him want to hold Steve, shake him. "Fucksake, why didn’t you just find a place to be safe, Steve?"

Steve looks up at him, still chewing, and his expression is calm. Amused. He just shakes his head simply, shrugs. "I couldn’t stop looking, Buck. I hadn’t found you."

This goddamn idiot, stubborn and relentless. Beautiful. Bucky hasn’t got the words to reply, but he can throw a cloth at Steve’s head, so he does that instead. 

Steve bats it away idly and walks to the edge of the treeline, kneels to look at the traps Bucky’s made. "You rig this up? Brass wire?"

"Yeah." Bucky follows, bends to adjust a snare. It’s getting easier to do.

"I mostly had to hunt." Steve sounds wistful, and Bucky grins at him, sharp.

"Oh, we do that too."

"We?" Steve raises an eyebrow.

Bucky smiles, and feels Wolf come up beside him, nosing his hand.

"Oh." Steve's eyes widen. "You hunt together."

And when Steve sees it—when he sees how Bucky and wolf hunt, two not-human things as a lethal team—he pulls Bucky into the kind of kiss that Bucky could live off, the kind of kiss saints in the desert could have fasted on for years.

  
  


* * *

Steve’s been here a week and Bucky’s still not used to it. Waking every day in his arms, seeing that sleepiness shift into sharpness as he wakes. Bucky feels himself getting more whole every day. He’s smiling as he thinks of it, walking through the woods near the cabin. Steve headed out here to explore a little earlier, and now night’s drawing in. Bucky’s looking for him.

He finds him easily enough, but—oh. Steve’s found the crosses. Bucky’s added many more since that first tear-filled day, each one added with penitence and tears. This place is precious. Then he sees Steve’s expression and his heart sinks. This is going to be conflict.

"Bucky." Steve chokes it as he stands up. "You made these." It’s not a question. Who else would have cause to carve three hundred penitent crosses near the cabin, a handful with names and dates?

"I did." Bucky’s wary. Better keep his powder dry until he knows what this is about.

Steve gestures, angry, a sweeping movement across the glade. "What you did all those years: it _wasn’t you_ ."

He closes his eyes briefly, then opens them, looks directly at Steve. "I know. But I did it." He's keeping himself soft, his body untensed, face open. It’s not enough.

"Fuck’s sake!" Steve’s rage is fierce. "You’re torturing yourself. It was _them_. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Hate _them_ , not yourself!" It’s anguish, an appeal. "Let this go!"

That does it. Steve’s rage is real but Bucky can match it, deep grief and despair welling up from the cold, quiet places he’s buried it until now.

"I _know_ what they did to me! I know they poured me out, made me a— a machine, a cruel thing. I know what they took! They took my mind and freedom and memories and I know _this,_ " and now he’s shaking, defiant, screaming this truth. "I know that when I made those crosses, when I mourned and felt sorry, I know I was making myself _something they never wanted me to be_."

The last word rings around the wood. Bucky’s breathing fast, like he’s in combat.

Steve’s face slackens with sudden understanding, and then Bucky’s in his arms, wrapped by all that strength. "Shit. I didn’t think. You’re right." Steve pulls back to look at him and Bucky's shocked to see tears gleaming. "You’re wise, you always were. Fuck." Steve rubs one hand roughly over his face, and he’s shaking too. "Fuck. I—" This incoherence isn’t like Steve. It takes a lot to break his impenetrable confidence and force.

"Stevie." Bucky speaks low. "Come inside. We can talk there," and Steve does. He still seems disoriented when he gets indoors, and Bucky aches to hold and reconnect with him in the most primal way he can. He hauls Steve into the bedroom and Steve goes into his arms willingly, his dazed expression turning desperate and hungry. Their kisses are interspersed with tugging off each other’s clothes, barely pulling away from each other’s lips as they do it, frantic for contact. Then they’re under the covers, wrapped together.

Somehow, once they’re there, skin to skin, they both pause. Steve’s big hands are splayed protectively across the small of Bucky’s back, and Bucky’s are curled around Steve’s shoulders. Steve looks at him, his expression anguished.

They’re wrapped together, body heat to body heat, Steve’s thigh between Bucky’s. Bucky waits. He’s not sure for what, but he knows Steve wants to speak. 

The cabin’s so quiet. In their hurry they didn’t light the fire, so there isn’t even the rustle of flames. Bucky sees Steve’s jaw flex, feels a tremor shake that strong body.

Steve mutters, “I messed up.” He swallows visibly. "I could have saved more people. I could have done more. And I—even when I helped, when _we_ helped—all of us, the Avengers—sometimes people died. Sometimes we even made it worse." He’s shivering now. "So much death. How many crosses—I wouldn’t even fit them in the woods," but Bucky puts a finger on his lips and at the touch Steve stops speaking.

He studies Steve’s face. He can hear the wind picking up again outside and the cabin’s temperature’s already dropping, but they are warm here, together. Steve’s not looking away from his face, his lips still under Bucky’s gentle finger.

He looks at Steve, candid. "What I found is," he says, carefully. He knows Steve, he knows nothing that he says next is going to be easy for Steve to hear. "I can’t fix what I did wrong, and I can’t like, make an act of contrition. I _can’t_ atone, ever. All I can do is remember. I mean," he indicates his own head, "I can try."

Steve’s listening, his eyes shadowed, but he’s clearly taking no comfort. He needs touch, not words. Bucky sits up and runs his hands softly over Steve’s shoulders, his arms, massaging the tension out of him, it feels to Bucky like love is spilling out under his hands—like candlelight, like peace.

Steve breathes in deeply, soothed, but his eyes are still hungry.

"Steve," Bucky breathes. "What do you need."

Steve’s bends to touch his mouth to Bucky’s ear, and is voice is husky. "I need to take you."

"You can," Bucky twists in his grasp, he wants Steve to touch him, he wants all of it. "You can."

"No." Steve’s grip becomes almost painful, clenching in Bucky’s hair and arching him back enough to gasp. Steve sounds almost agonized. "I need—I need— "

Bucky opens his eyes and looks at Steve from under hooded lids, lips parted. Steve looks ravenous, his eyes dark and burning. Bucky grinds up against him, sinuous, hungry, aching for more, and Steve closes his eyes and groans. "Let me. Please.”

Bucky’s body reacts to the words, heat pooling between his legs and his back arching, and Steve’s next whisper is rougher. “Give me control, Bucky," and ecstasy unwinds in Bucky to hear it, the plea, the _relief_ of it.

"Please.” Bucky’s dazed with longing. “Take it, take _me_ ," and then Steve’s hands push him back and down, Steve’s weight pressing on him, and Bucky meets his lips with a kiss that says _Yes. I need this too._

It’s different, this time, less tender, more frantic, and hands won’t cut it—Bucky wants Steve _inside_ him and he knows Steve feels the same. The storm is building and the cabin’s getting even colder, so they can’t move much, can’t risk blankets slipping and precious heat being lost. They move with soft sighs and gasps, slow and careful. They make it work.

It’s _bliss._ Bucky’s under Steve, face down, and Steve over his back, deep inside him, moving smooth and slow and merciless and Bucky’s near dying with the pleasure and torment of it.

"More," he gasps and Steve knows what Bucky needs, remembers from so long ago: he pulls Bucky’s hair back, makes his body arch so that the next thrust goes deeper. Bucky cries out, grinding too, hard and wet against the sheets, seeking relief. He loves being taken like this, loves giving up control, and he feels so free, so real. He’s close, he’s so close, and Steve’s whispering in his ear, teeth nipping at his lobe, "Do it, come now, let me feel you, do it _now._ " 

Bucky comes _hard_ , the command undoing him in a release more than just an orgasm—it’s the bone deep relief of submission and surrender. 

As he slumps warm and blissful he feels Steve shudder, jerking his own release deep and wet. Then they’re both still, the only sound their ragged breathing and the whirl of the snow outside. They're warm.

  
  
  


* * *

"Come on!" Bucky’s laughing and Wolf is barking, and Steve’s standing at the door to the cabin, watching them both, smiling. It’s the evening of the next day and the blizzard’s finally ended. "Come with us! Come hunt!" Bucky’s skin s thrumming with joy and he wants to race, to jump and fight and play, and an answering fire kindles in Steve’s eyes.

Then they’re together, the three of them racing over snow, under moon. When they catch their prey they howl, all three—all wild, all together. Pack.

  
  


* * *

They’re happy. It’s that simple, a miracle and ordinary at once. Sometimes, though, a sadness crosses Steve’s face. It happens when he speaks about his friends, and one night he shows Bucky the communicator that Howard’s kid made for him.

"It powers itself from ambient energy but I can’t find an energy source high enough. Now the electricity generators have all gone, power’s cut out. There isn’t anywhere that emits power."

Bucky stares at the gadget and thinks of swirling blue-green light, spiking webs of color and force.

His eyes narrow and he raises his chin. "Maybe there is."

* * *


	12. Hollow Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moments in chapter 12 and 13 are climactic, but by the end of chapter 13 things fall into place! And especially: **WOLF IS FINE OKAY**. As always, our well-meaning PoV Bucky narrator is not able to be entirely reliable about interpreting circumstances. ALL WILL BE WELL FOR ***ALL THREE*** OF THEM VERY SOON trust me :D

**[Please see author note reassurance re this chapter: All three characters are going to be fine, Wolf, Steve and Bucky! And chapter 13 is posting right after this!]**

* * *

  
  


Wild colors whip the sky and Steve and Bucky watch them, shoulder to shoulder, the tent flap ajar. The campfire’s burned low and Wolf is off prowling.

"What is it?" Steve’s voice is soft.

Bucky’s puzzled. "Haven’t you seen it before? In all your time alone?"

He feels Steve shrug, "These only started recently, and I was always too far from it to get there in time." His voice is awed. "It’s almost like a borealis, but earthbound."

"Yeah." Bucky’s pensive. "It’s beautiful and weird. I got close to one once." He’ll never forget it, that lake of light—the raging colors, the silence and the deep night. "A basin in the hills, just outside Lake Baikal." Words quail at the memory of it, the swirl and pull, the hypnotic _otherness_ of solar flares at ground level. "You said it only started recently?"

Steve nods. "In the last eight months."

Another cryptic clue? Bucky sighs. "Let’s get some rest, I wanna get to the top of the lake before tomorrow night. I think it’s coming from there."

They close the tent flap and lie together, warm. Steve falls asleep first. He’s sleeping longer and more deeply than Bucky remembers him doing since Brooklyn, clearly still drained by the terrible isolation and hopelessness of those weary years alone. Bucky holds him close, and wonders.

Steve’s team. What would they be like? He imagines a younger Howard, a defected spy, a scientist, an archer ( _archer_?) and a—Viking? Steve hesitated there and Bucky’s sure there is more to that one.

Bucky desperately wants Steve to regain contact with his team. He clearly cares about them a lot. For a moment he lets his thoughts drift, fanciful. What if, improbably, his team are fine, and still have the means to fly? Would Brooklyn ever be possible again? He blinks, deliberately shuts down that thought. Some dreams are too dangerous, hurt too much. And besides, _this_ is home now, and home hard-won—the cabin, the wolf. A refuge in the kindness of the Altai, a land that has given them the means to survive, be happy.

And what would Steve’s team make of Bucky? He’s sure, with a deep, cold surety, that the Red Room hacker would have found out what he did, what he became. He didn’t interact with the Red Room much, but he knows their reputation. 

Bucky would be lying if he said he wasn’t nervous about how all this will turn out. If this works, if the communicator can be resurrected, and if—big _if_ —Steve’s friends are still alive, then Bucky might meet them. His shame is thick around him, a tangible cloak, but at the same time, Bucky feels a deep longing for _people_ , bustle, a community. Not just him and Steve and Wolf, but more. They’re strong, but in this vast landscape they are still so small.

He nestles closer to Steve. Through the canvas, the sky rages.

* * *

The next day, things get weird.

It starts small. They’re still hiking north, heading up towards where the lights appear at night. It’s daylight now, and as they trudge over the snow Bucky tries to ignore the cold unease building in his body.

After all, the lights aren’t the only thing up here. He’s managed to avoid thinking about the Hydra missile bunker since that first dream brought the memory back, but he knows it’s there. He's just hoping that it’s nothing to do with the lights.

"Huh."

Bucky’s pulled out of his reverie. Steve’s stopped beside—what’s that?

They’re in a part of the forest drenched with blood vines, thicker than Bucky’s ever seen. They’re clustered around a tree trunk and at first glance it seems covered in moss, but no. It’s a dense fungus, scarlet, totally encasing whatever’s beneath. Bucky feels his lips twist.

Steve frowns. "Seen this before?"

Bucky shakes his head, face tight.

"Me neither." Steve looks at it a little longer and then they keep going, but that’s not the last of the fungus. Bucky sees it clustered on trees, on forested banks, even, in one place, entirely covering a glade floor. The blood vines are always alongside and Bucky’s sure there is a link. Another fucking clue, but to what? Always and everywhere, the blood vines, thick and clotted. He’s grown used to them, but the sheer mass of them here is weighing on him.

"The lights." Steve sounds thoughtful. "Let’s go over what you know."

"Well," Bucky glances at Wolf walking beside him, and wonders.

He stops walking and kneels in front of her. " _You_ liked them."

She looks at him, flicks her ears, tosses her head slightly. But he persists, "You did. You went in it and afterward your eyes were all—glowing, like the—-phenomenon."

Steve shifts, impatient. "She went _in_?"

Bucky doesn’t look away from Wolf. "Hey." He’s addressing her directly now, and he knows that is probably crazy but he wants to ask her a question. "What was it?"

She _rhuffs_ and starts walking. Bucky looks up at Steve, wry. "Guess we have to find out by ourselves."

  
  


* * *

The lights and vines aren’t the only strange thing.

Bucky recognizes it as soon as he sees it, They’ve been steadily climbing, the gradient increasingly sharp as they approach the foothills of the mountains north of the Teletskoye. There, about half a mile northeast, is a fine Soviet example of _Бутафорское здание_.

Bucky stops walking. 

"Buck?" 

Steve’s beside him in an instant, and Bucky shakes his head, grins. 

"It’s fine, I was just—surprised. I remember that," and he points. Steve whirls to look.

It doesn’t look remarkable, just an ordinary four-story concrete building. Bucky tilts his head. "Come and see."

As they get closer, Bucky sees the red tendrils of thick vines emerging from the cracked windows. Steve reaches it before he does, ducks inside, and Bucky hears his laugh of surprise. "Huh. Didn’t expect that."

Bucky slips in behind him. "Yeah. See? It’s hollow." Despite the many floors and windows, the inside of the building is a vast floor-to-roof empty space. Steel stairs lead to a rudimentary walkway all around, presumably to install the windows, but the building itself is just a huge fake-out.

"A facade," Bucky explains. "A decoy. The USSR built them to distract attention away from nearby covert installations."

It’s strange to see it now, this structure, its whole purpose gone. Such colossal efforts by so many nations during that Cold War and afterward, to deceive, to aspire, to win. It’s all wasted now, like everything else. Human effort, dwindled into irrelevance.

They keep heading north.

  
* * * 

The sun’s setting and they’ve been walking in silence for about an hour. Bucky’s lulled by the rhythm of their steps, the soft _schw, schw_ of fabric, but he snaps alert when Steve says sharply, "What’s that."

Bucky hears it too: a _sucking_ sound, directly ahead.

Bucky crouches instinctively, drawing his knife from his thigh sheath. Steve’s jaw is set and his face is grim, and he has his own knife drawn. He jerks his head and sets off, Bucky following, silent.

After about a hundred yards Steve lifts a flat palm, _pause_ , and Bucky does. The sucking is louder now, but all Bucky can see is a nearby open glade, thickly carpeted with blood vines. Steve gestures and they keep walking until they reach the edge.

The trees have been cleared from here before, probably by fire, so nothing blocks the weak sunlight. Snow lies thick on all the branches and all other surfaces but strangely there’s no snow on the ground, just the ubiquitous, thick, blood-red carpet.

It’s ethereal. The winter sun is pallid but the surprise of it and the matted red makes the glade seem otherworldly, lit with a reddish light that belongs to a story. Then— _Wolf_ , barking, she’s running, she’s —Bucky shouts but it’s too late, she _jumps_ and—

—it’s not a carpet, dear God, it’s a _pit_ —

Bucky’s screaming and Steve’s holding him, and Wolf’s gone, she’s _gone._

 _“Bucky_.” Steve’s voice is agonized and his arms are a vice, “Wait _!”_ But Bucky doesn’t care, it’s too much, he can’t lose his friend, he must follow. He has to save her. He struggles against those relentless arms, tears himself out of Steve’s grip, and now he’s running through the dusk.

At the edge of the pit, he doesn’t hesitate. 

He jumps. 

He’s falling down through wet, cloying tendrils, down down down, and it’s like falling through time, through bloody water. Then he hits the base with a thud.

He’s breathless, disoriented, but sits up. It’s hard to see what’s down here, the vines are so thick and the setting sun can’t penetrate the pit at this angle. He narrows his gaze and stares and yes—there is something in the corner. The vines are writhing.

He staggers to them, slipping, falling headlong twice, getting up and keeping going, and oh _god_ , it’s Wolf. 

The vines are already wrapped around her soft white fur. They aren’t covering her beautiful face, and they aren’t tight, they’re not squeezing her at all, she looks peaceful. But she’s--

She doesn’t seem to be breathing.

He swallows.

She’s not breathing.

She’s dead. 

Bucky breaks down. He can’t help it. He hugs what he can reach of her and cries into her fur. _Why_ did she jump?

He can’t take it in. She can’t be gone. Not his vibrant, breathing, loving companion. 

He doesn’t know how long he’s there, but after a while Steve’s hands tighten on his shoulders. "Bucky, come," and when he looks down he sees that vines have started to wind around his own boots.

He jerks back, and yields to Steve’s pulling. There’s no point in staying here now, but his heart’s bleeding as they clamber out. It takes about half an hour, and Bucky’s on automatic. It’s only on reaching the top that Bucky falls to his knees and lets himself feel again.

Steve’s around him, arms tight. "Bucky, shhhh."

"Why did she jump?" He looks up at Steve, tear-stained and pleading. "Why?"

Steve bites his lip, looks troubled. "I don’t know, Bucky, but she did. She chose this. We don’t understand it, but she did."

Bucky sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. "She knew a lot more than I did, that was for sure. She never seemed scared of the vines." And _even now_ , there is a feeling that there is a clue he’s missing, something he is just not quite seeing, but his heart is broken and he can’t push the thought further.

"Bucky." Steve’s voice is hushed, and when Bucky looks at him he sees that he’s looking at the pit. Bucky turns to see why and—what?

It’s not just a pit. It’s a mouth.

The vines are thick all around the edges, and Bucky sees with horror that the edges are—

"Steve," he whispers, appalled. "They’re moving."

The vines at the sides of the pit are shifting like they’re breathing, swallowing. Bucky backs away, horrified, and that’s when he sees it. The twilight is deeper now, and misty light, blue and green, is being _exhaled_ from the blood vines. The lights climb up through the cold sky, swirling colors, energy, and Bucky knows they have found what they came for and he doesn’t care. His face is wet. He’s lost his friend.

Steve exhales, slow and long. He closes his eyes tightly, then fishes out the communicator, holds it up to the light.

They both wait, looking at the little machine. It’s matte black, with a bulb for an indicator light, and it’s dark.

They wait.

The lights build, silent, surging up in the wild fierce beauty of the borealis and Bucky sees Steve’s face vivid under the neon violence of the sky.

After forty minutes Bucky knows there is no point. Steve’s expressionless, and the gadget is still dead. They’ve failed, and what a price they’ve paid for trying.

Bucky staggers to his feet and stumbles out of the wood. Steve follows. And when Bucky leaves the tree line he falls to his knees and he _howls_.

He howls for his packmate. He howls for his pack. And Steve is beside him and lifts up his voice too. Their grief can break the sky. Wolf is gone but they will remember her. They will remember.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOLF IS FINE! CHAPTER 13 IS BEING POSTED RIGHT NOW!


	13. Legacies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's strange, being underground again.

Bucky is dry-eyed the next day, hollowed out by a night of silent weeping. Steve’s expression is tender but practical. 

"We head back?"

Bucky shakes his head. He’ll be damned if this horrific journey will be wasted. "No. There’s one more place we can try."

  
* * *

Well. Bucky never expected to be back here.

The bunker’s well hidden but Bucky knew how to reach it, the automaton puppetry they implanted leaving breadcrumbs for him to follow. It’s very similar to the one near the Arctic circle. Dark walls, long corridors, radiating in spokes from a central hub and nuclear missile silos at the terminus of each arm. Bucky’s grimly unsurprised to recall there are eight.

The bunker has multiple levels, so he’s not concerned when the first level is devoid of electricity. He remembers that the Arctic bunker had lighting on the lower levels rather than the upper. 

"Come on."

They head into the dark.

* * *

It’s strange, being underground again. When he woke in the Arctic bunker he was ragged, barely a person, a tangled mess of terror and confusion. He didn’t even know his own name. Since then, he’s remembered it, remembered _Steve_ , he made a friend in Wolf—though he can’t bear that thought right now. He found all these things, found _himself_ , made a home.

He remembers, with sudden distinctness, hunching over those cans of condensed milk in that bunker, drinking them in the dark, shaking and scared. Turning the radio dials and hearing nothing but silence. Finding that coat and scarf, soft against his cheeks, making him feel—cared for, human.

His chest floods with warmth. Somehow he was healed, mended, through luck and effort and necessary failure, healed through the kindness of Wolf and forest and friend. Grief is thick in his throat.

Just get what we need, and go home. Mourn Wolf, and keep building. He sets his shoulders, and keeps moving down through the ruin.

  
  


* * *

Strangely, vines are here too. Bucky would have assumed they’d avoid a subterranean structure—how would they photosynthesize without light?—but they are everywhere and only increase as he and Steve descend to the lower levels. It confirms something he’s suspected since seeing that red fungus in the wood. The vines must be partly fungal, using light-less chemosynthesis to survive in dark places.

The third level has faint track lighting along the walls and corridors, and Steve bends to bring the communicator near it. Bucky waits. Water drips heavily nearby and the smell of mold is familiar, unpleasant.

Steve looks up, shakes his head. Bucky nods. "Let’s keep going. If these lights are working, there’ll be generators."

There are gaps in the floor now, echoing, wet gulfs that breathe decay. They climb around them carefully. Once, they have to jump a crevasse eight feet across. And then—they’re here.

The walls and close ceiling fall away and Bucky looks up into another vast parody of cathedral space. The center of the room has a control platform with computers, exactly like the other bunker, and it’s _live_. It’s spot-lit with lights and bright beams bisecting the dark. The sheer impossibility of it floods Bucky’s chest. They did it! 

Steve doesn’t waste time, runs to the equipment and holds up the communicator. Then, "YES!" and Bucky knows it’s worked. Steve glances back, his smile triumphant, and Bucky clenches his fist in joyful salute. Maybe this is really going to work. Maybe Steve will be able to reach his team! Bucky can’t stop smiling. They’ve done the first part of it, at least. They found power!

They’re both quiet, processing the possibilities, watching the charging light, waiting for it to reach max.

After about half an hour, Bucky stands up, stretches, and looks around. He can’t help being curious. He’s back in a space like that which un-made him, but now he’s re-made, able to see it and think about it in ways he couldn’t before. He walks towards the walls, wondering if there’ll be any evidence that this bunker too, held those cold glass coffins. Mercifully there’s nothing but dust, no evidence that others were ever imprisoned like him. That nightmare really is over.

A grinding sound, something old, like stone slabs shifting. A recording. Bucky looks up, surprised, and sees Steve looking around too. There’s no sign of any people, but some old address system must have been activated. Then a word in Russian. One word.

_" <Longing>."_

Horror hits Bucky as cold violence and he’s whirling, running, racing to the exit.

_" <Rusted>."_

Every cell in him is screaming _NO_ , desperate refusal of what is about to happen, the horrific syllables which will unwind him from himself, but he can’t think that yet, he needs to _move_ — 

_" <Seventeen>."_

_Run_. He doesn’t know if Steve knows about the trigger words, but he can’t explain, he must _go_ , but this room’s huge and he—

_" <Daybreak>."_

He’s sobbing now, nearly back to the corridor. To have won his mind back and to have it taken away _now_ , like _this_? _NO_.

But defiance never could fight the Words.

_" <Furnace>."_

_" <Benign>."_

He hears Steve shout behind him but he can’t stop. He plunges into the labyrinth, racing through the passageways, but he can still hear it—

_" <Freight car>."_

Bucky doesn’t stop running but the word hits him in the solar plexus. Incredulity. That’s not the next—

 _" <Homecoming>."_

Thank God. They _garbled the sequence_.

He stops running, reaches out a trembling hand to lean against the decaying wall. The right words, but the wrong sequence. He’s safe. It’s over. His eyes are wet.

It makes sense. He’s seen it all around him: the degradation, the slow dwindling of Hydra and Soviet power. Whoever recorded this didn’t have the original Red Book, and why would they? It would have been transmitted some other way. They might not even have realized how crucial it was to have all the words in order, or maybe they were written out of sequence for fear of spies and the reader didn’t have a key to decode it.

_" <Schoolfriend>."_

It’s like the hollow building that he and Steve saw on the way here. Clever tricks, to control and manipulate, but they all crumble in the end. The same is true here. All the cruelty and brainwashing that made the Winter Soldier have cracked and withered too, just like the decoy buildings, just like the bunker itself. He looks at his hand on the shabby wall, pulls it away, looks at the rust on his fingers. It’s finished. He’s safe. It’s over. The Words can’t hurt him anymore.

_" <Falling>."_

Bucky leans against the wall in the dank, puddled corridor, laughing and crying all at once. _Thank you. Thank you_. He woke up in that bunker far away a year ago, and now it’s like he wakes again, is reborn again, spared from torment, _freed._

Bucky stands up, dusts himself off. Better go and explain to Steve. Since the Red Room hacker found his file Steve might know about the triggers, might have guessed why he ran. Bucky’s smiling as he turns the corner back into the room.

Steve’s looking at him, blank.

Bucky’s eyes widen.

In that moment, he knows. The knowledge enters his body like surgery, sharp, before it can even become thought, and even as his mind rejects it Steve _slams_ Bucky in the chest and Bucky falls backwards, gasping.

No, no, they can’t have taken your sunlight, your light, not the Chair, not the _Words—_

Steve’s striding towards him, still dead-faced, murderous, and Bucky scrambles up, retreats. This can’t be real. But it is.

The words weren’t for him. They were for Steve.

_Oh, Steve. They had you for more than two weeks._

Bucky runs.

There’s nothing else he can do. He will not hurt Steve and Steve will fight, so run he does, grief blurring the dark corridors, the cold passages.

Steve is chasing, of course he is, and he’s faster than Bucky, his serum stronger. But Bucky knows the layout of these bunkers better and, with regret, he twists around a gap in the floor and throws himself into side corridor where he is sure he can lose him. Steve chases but slips at the edge of the hole—he’s still disoriented from the words, surely—and that gives Bucky time to get ahead and dive into the maze.

When he gets out of the bunker he runs for about twenty minutes, his feet pounding the snow, face covered with tears. He’s leaving Steve in the dark.

  
  
  


* * *

Bucky’s shivering, and it’s morning.

He spent the night in an improvised snow-hive, like he did that first night he left the Arctic bunker. He left his bag and equipment in this bunker when he ran, so all he has is his clothes, thankfully waterproof, and the knives and guns on him. Now the gray dawn light is creeping over the snow and Bucky is slumped, dazed, against a tree.

He is going to go back in, will try and find a way to bring Steve round, even though he can’t see any way to make it work. Of course he won’t go back to the cabin without him. How can he? It was home, and now he’s lost Steve and Wolf. 

All the cabin would be now is wood with something dead inside it.

 _Steve. Darling Stevie. They had you more than two weeks._ That thought keeps running in Bucky’s head, the nightmare of it, the knowledge that Steve experienced the Chair, the Words. They might even have let him go on purpose, thinking he might find Bucky—maybe by that time they’d forgotten where _he_ was. Who knows?

Oh, Stevie. Bucky can’t bear it. There’s no time for this. He needs to make a plan, try and find a way to save him. Shaken and heartbroken, he stares blankly, tries to concentrate. That was a trap, for Steve if not for him and the thing about a trap is: you need someone to set it. It’s possible, sure, that the people who set it are dead, but Bucky still hasn’t forgotten the one other human figure, apart from Steve, that he’s seen since he woke: the _Podpolkóvnik_ outside Oymyakon.

He’s slumped gazing unseeingly at the blur of green and red ahead of him. Then his eyes refocus and he realises what he’s seeing.

A squirrel’s climbing into a tree about fifteen feet away, entirely untroubled by Bucky’s presence. The tree is draped with blood vines but the squirrel seems wholly unbothered by those too, and in fact—Bucky blinks—it’s _using_ them! It’s heaping vines up in a pile on the boughs and—dear God, it’s making some kind of nest!

Bucky scrambles to his feet, _utterly_ unable to watch those vicious, bloody things kill something else right in front of him and then—the squirrel _lies down_ in the vine nest looking absolutely peaceful.

Bucky stops, and

suddenly

it all

falls

into

place.

Bucky feels his eyes widen, his mouth fall open, and he’s flooded with images. 

The wolf, running _to_ the vines, _greeting_ the vines, untroubled, when they woke in the vine-swamped camp. The vines growing in places with life, not to prey on it as he thought, but to _protect_ it from the virus _,_ in some magical, mysterious para-scientific way that he cannot understand but finally, finally believes.

It’s been in front of him the whole time. The vines aren’t a threat, they’re a _help._ They’re a natural thing, mutated in response to the bioweapon Steve described, with strange curative capacities. Bucky is sure he will never understand the mechanism, but he doesn’t need to.

Blood vines. _Clotted_ , red.

"Something clots when it’s trying to heal." He says it aloud, slow, amazed.

 _The vines came after. When everything was finished._ That’s what Steve said. The vines are aftermath. 

Bucky looks at the nearest red tendril. This is the world remaking itself, after humans. The earth’s story doesn’t stop just because we do.

His eyes are open now. And he has somewhere he needs to be. If they aren’t dangerous—

—the vines took Wolf—

—but not to hurt her.

Bucky starts running.

  
  


* * *


	14. Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels not surprise but weary resignation to see, on the second level, someone waiting for him.
> 
> It’s not Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OMG the amazing [QUIETNIGHT has made a PODFIC!!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018629/chapters/55040413), and it’s absolutely breathtaking 😭😭❤️❤️!

  
  
It takes half a day to locate the pit again. When he does, it’s hard to keep the new insight in mind, the glade is charged with such grief and horror for him. But he is here because he has hope.

It’s quiet. The red tendrils have started to re-cover the gash in the earth, but Bucky doesn’t hesitate. He jumps right in and it’s eerie, falling past the red-streaked, breathing tendrils. They brush his arms and the musty smell of them fills his lungs, but he doesn’t care. He has a mission.

This time, nothing is moving down here. He looks around, tries to find where Wolf was, and starts patrolling the perimeter to find her. 

It’s slow work. Today the vines aren’t moving, everything’s still, and now that he isn’t as horrified by the vines he can even feel a calmness here. It’s hard to remember the horror he felt down here before. If it weren’t for his terrible loss, he’d wonder if it all really happened. He shakes his head, grits his teeth. Keeps moving. Searching.

Then he finds her.

Her white fur gleams against the scarlet. She’s lying down, but there are no vines around her now and relief stabs Bucky’s chest with joyful pain. Her flanks are rising and falling. She’s _alive_.

Bucky rests his hands on the thick fur at her neck and yes, she’s breathing. He hugs her, buries his face in her fur and holds her close, closes his eyes and surrenders to the deep joy that sings through him.

She shifts, opens her eyes, lifts her muzzle, and nudges him on the head.

"You’re fine. You’re _fine_." He’s laughing and she’s licking his face and he could swear she looks amused. "You knew the vines were good. You knew they helped living things, protecting them. That’s why you weren’t scared."

Wolf _rhuffs_ , bumps his chin with her muzzle.

"But why weren’t you breathing? When we came down after you? Was it some kind of—suspended animation, some healing state? Oh I don’t care how it worked, I’m just so glad you’re back." He’s hugging her again, buried in her familiar fur, and his relief is indescribable. But it isn’t over.

"Pal. We gotta get Steve back." 

She blinks at him, her blue eyes calm.

* * *

It’s hard to get out, but she patiently tolerates being slung over his back. It takes about a hour, even with the serum. He wonders how she’d have got out on her own but he knows, now, that there will always be things that she knows how to do in this new world far better than he does.

He’s breathless when he emerges, but there’s no time to waste. He doesn’t want Steve to spend another night in the bunker. Wolf is healed, and if he can somehow help Steve emerge from the Words then they could all three be together again.

  
  


* * *

It’s late afternoon when they reach the bunker, and with the short winter days the night’s already drawing in.

_How_ can he break the programming? Can he try to knock Steve out? That’ll be hard to do, since Steve’s stronger and faster than he is. Wolf could help, but he’s scared of her getting hurt. Maybe the best plan is for Wolf to bark, bait Steve, draw him forward, and Bucky ambushes from the side.

Either way, he needs to go back in there.

This time the bunker seems a thousand times more menacing. Last time he was here with Steve, crushed from the loss of Wolf but still together. Now, he’s consciously descending into a place that he knows has technology that could take his mind away. 

If it weren’t for him, Steve’s mind would be intact right now. This is all Bucky’s fault.

Walking with these bleak thoughts, he feels not surprise but weary resignation to see, on the second level, someone waiting for him.

It’s not Steve.

  
  


* * *

" _Soldat_." A long, slow smile, and a silhouette that strikes absolute dread. It’s the _Podpolkóvnik_.

Bucky freezes, and the wolf whines, draws close, and the officer laughs. 

"You’ve found a pet?" He’s wearing the same uniform, oddly undamaged and unweathered despite the time that’s lapsed since Bucky saw him outside Oymyakon, and he draws nearer, eyes glittering with malice. "It’s time to get back to work, _Soldat_."

Defeat. Bucky should have known it would come to this. How did he ever expect to escape being what they made him? The mere presence of the officer is enough to tip the balance, the years of erasure, the long months of challenge, the loss of _Steve_. It’s all finally too much to bear. Bucky drops his head forward, goes limp. He waits for the Words—not benign, and no kind of homecoming.

The last thought he has is of Steve. 

He tries to fix the image of him clear in his mind: sharp small Stevie, his sharp smile and defiance, and Steve as Captain, fearless. But most of all, this new, older Steve who has made a home with him in the Altai. Steve repairing the cabin, looking down at him from the roof, smiling—Steve in the orange gleam of their shared fire—Steve in shadow, kissing him, sculpted in moonlight. This new Steve so weary but so beautiful, so wounded but still strong. Bucky fills his mind with the memory of him.

The images will melt like ice, drain away like water. 

Bucky’s head is bowed. He’s fought for decades, but nobody can fight forever. 

Through the haze he dimly senses fur warm under his hand and a sharp pain in his fingers. He lifts his head, roused. Wolf’s nipped him. She’s growling, low, and suddenly it’s as if the growling is in him, a rage building and he won’t hold it back, not now, and he strides _forward_.

Bucky’s steps are deliberate, and the _Podpolkóvnik_ opens his mouth, about to say the Words, but Bucky is going to speak, he is going to say this, even if then the Words carve out everything he is.

"I remember what you did." His voice is soft, shaking, but it’s gathering strength, "I complied, I _believed_ it," he takes another step. "But I don’t now." He dares to look directly at the officer. The man has gone still, his contemptuous smile ebbing to something more dangerous. "I believed it all those long decades." Bucky swallows, it’s nearly a whisper, but then he says it again, says it louder. "I don’t believe it now. I deserve to live. _WE deserve to live!_ " and he’s shouting the truth, screaming it to the rooftop, doomed defiance echoing against the cold bunker walls.

Then he looks back at the officer and—

No. Where is he?

Bucky stares in disbelief at the empty space. The man couldn’t have hidden that quickly. He rubs a trembling hand over his face, and waits. Is he going mad?

Ten minutes tick by, Bucky shivering in the adrenaline aftermath, until finally the long slow minutes make the truth clear.

A hallucination. That’s why his uniform never changed, that’s why he only ever appeared when Bucky felt guilty. He closes his eyes and leans against the wall of the tunnel, and thinks: _exorcism._

* * *

Bucky and Wolf burst into the open space at the center of the fourth level. Where is Steve? They haven’t been attacked, so have the words worn off? It’s unlikely.

There’s no sign of him, but Bucky is sure he wouldn’t have gone far from here. He’d be waiting for orders—then Wolf barks and bounds towards something in the far corner. The vines hang thick there and at the base is—

Bucky takes off after her, running. That’s a cocoon of vines, easily big enough, and Bucky’s on his knees, heedless, unravelling them, rolling the cocoon over and _yes._

Steve’s face is peaceful, asleep, under the vines just like Wolf was, but now Bucky doesn't panic. The vines aren’t an enemy. He brushes the long hair from his face and murmurs, "Stevie."

Steve opens his eyes and in that moment, for Bucky, the dark cavern is as bright as any spring meadow. Joy’s painful in his chest.

"Buck?" Steve’s voice is sleep-rough but it’s him. He’s back. Whatever sleep the vines pulled him down into helped him. 

"Long story, honey. We have to get you home." Wolf is shoving Bucky’s arm away with her muzzle and licking Steve’s face and he’s laughing, turning his head away, incredulous. "Wolf! You’re okay! What?"

Bucky can’t stop grinning as he untangles the vines from Steve’s legs, helps him up. "The story can wait." Bucky even remembers to pick up the communicator. As they walk to the exit, Steve still unsteady, Bucky sees the indicator light flashing. It’s at full charge.

  
  
  


* * *

They’re walking on white snow under bright sky, Bucky’s arm across Steve’s shoulder. He can’t bear to let go. Steve keeps glancing at Wolf, amazed. "You’re fine." He looks at Bucky. "What happened?"

Bucky grins, embarrassed. "I finally worked it out. I’ve been an idiot, Steve. There’ve been so many clues. The vines aren’t a threat to living things, they’re the _opposite_ , and she’s always known that."

Steve’s eyes widen and Bucky shrugs. "I can’t explain it and I’m not even sure scientific analysis would be able to either. How can they move, grow so fast, survive underground? Generate _light_? _Heal_? What I am pretty sure of is this. The vines mutated after the virus, and collect in areas with life, not to hurt it but help it. They can generate light with a borealis effect, and that seems to be part of some healing process, maybe one which works with a soporific impact, makes people sleep and then accelerates natural healing. Sometimes they co-exist with red fungi, which suggests they survive partly through chemosynthesis. That’s all I got."

"That’s a lot." Steve looks at him sidelong, a corner of his lips lifted. "It makes sense. And well, they did help me."

Fierce thankfulness grips Bucky’s heart again that Steve was wrapped by the vines, saved by the sleep they wove around him.

* * *

  
  


Now they’re back in their cabin, the fire rustling warm and snow clouds darkening the window. Wolf is lying across the door.

"So." Steve’s jaw flexes. "We’re both vulnerable to those word triggers."

Bucky nods, solemn. He tucks his head onto Steve’s shoulder, savours the warmth and solidity of being close like this. Peaceful. "Yeah. Though I mean, at least we know the vines can be a kind of antidote. And hell, we still haven’t actually seen any survivors anyway, let alone Hydra. We know now the one I did see was, well—"

"Hallucination. Yeah." Steve’s silent a while. "We still don’t know if we’re the only people left." 

The fire crackles and they don’t speak. There’s dread to it. What if they are?

The communicator’s still flashing full charge, and Steve looks at Bucky. "Ready?"

Bucky nods, hope and apprehension warring in his chest. He wants this to work, for Steve to be able to reunite with his friends. Steve needs so much solace to ease the balm of that five years alone. _Please don’t let them all be gone._

Steve presses the buttons. It's a wide flat thing, bigger than a paperback and with a gadget and power pack on the right hand side. Bucky stares at the flat surface and wait, hoping, hoping …

... and then, a simple miracle.

"Steve?" An image flashes into life, a woman with particolored hair, blond and red. She looks tired, lines of long grief etched on her face, but right now her eyes are round and her mouth open. "Steve? Is that really you?"

"Nat?" Steve swallows, brings the communicator up close, trembling, and Bucky feels himself shaking too, the sheer impossibility of it: another person, another _voice_. He can’t take it in.

"Quick, location? How much access to power do you have?"

"Southern Siberia, Lake Teletskoye. We don’t have ready access to power so we need to—"

She cuts him off, nods efficiently. "The Altai." She smiles into the camera. "What an excellent choice.”

"We like it." Steve’s frank, and her smile widens.

"Initiate contact again in an hour. I’ll get the others. And Steve—"

Bucky feels Steve’s whole body relaxing against him. "Yes?"

"I’m so glad." A radiant smile and she cuts the link.

Steve exhales, sets down the communicator, and rubs a shaking hand over his face. He looks at Bucky, delighted, incredulous, a little wild. "Bucky!" Then they’re in each other’s arms, laughing. Hopeful.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE MORE TO GO! <3 <3 <3


	15. Building

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joy!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! I delayed it because, well, pandemic has slammed into my life in a whole lot of ways, cos of my small kids and remote working. I was also worried that maybe it would seem tactless to be posting a soft post-apocalypse fic at this time. But the whole thing has been building to this healing ending of solace, and so I offer it here with love and affection.
> 
> I am hoping that every single reader is in a place of safety and with warmth and friendship around you, both physical and virtual! 
> 
> I’ve made a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3nuCCH5UyHWP00xzPMgnmj?si=P_6pvY6oT7KOYQDB5Ul3Zg) and a [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dg32rRxIVZzypaTWDi1AW9d79j-Ry3D)! I’ve added two more tracks especially for this chapter, ['Autumn Rain Rework'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKapWVjo80c%22) and [Max Richter, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’](%E2%80%9D<a). And QUIETNIGHT is making a [PODFIC!!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018629/chapters/55040413), and i can’t describe how beautiful it is.❤️  
>   
> It's been absolutely magical to share this story with you. Thanks so much for coming along for the ride. <3   
>   
>   
> 

  
  
  
"Hey, Capsicle! So you’re still in Siberia, exploring hitherto unsuspected levels of chill." The guy on the screen has wide, clever dark eyes and a goatee—intriguing choice for maintaining during an apocalypse. The team have clearly patched the feed through to a monitor or something because Bucky can see Nat is sitting next to—Tony?—and there’s an empty chair beside them.

Steve grits his jaw and Bucky fights a grin. So this is Howard’s kid, and he obviously annoys Steve as much as Howard did. But Steve doesn’t bite. “Everyone, this is—" Steve swells with visible pride and protectiveness; it would be endearing if Bucky weren’t so nervous—"Sergeant James Barnes of the Howling Commandos," and he hauls him into the screen view.

There’s a stunned silence on the other end, then wild cheering. 

"Steve, you _found_ him!" Nat looks joyful.

Steve grins, pulls Bucky closer, tight against his side. "Well, to be honest, he found me. That’s uh, still a bit of a mystery,” Steve glances over at Wolf, “but we don’t have time for that." He gets serious. "Debrief."

"It’s been bad." Tony’s grave. In the background, Bucky can see a dilapidated concrete shelter with low electric lighting, so they have working generators, and people moving around in the background, so they have survivors. Relief uncurls in him to see it, the terrible silence of the world fading.

"I’m not gonna sugarcoat this, Rogers. We don’t have enough jet fuel to get you. We have managed to reconnect some radio transmitters and have partial control of the satellite network so I can scan your area, maybe help locate other survivors, but right now that’s all we can do. It’ll be at least a year, maybe two years, before any prospect of flying there, and even then it’s uncertain. Nat," he turns to her, "when’s Wilson coming?"

"I’ll get him," and she’s gone.

"What happened." Steve’s efficient, clearly starving for information.

Tony sighs, stretches out. "Gotta say, Rogers, it’s good to see you. Okay, okay. So, it’s bad. But Helen and Bruce made a vaccine. Too late for mass manufacture so we essentially started our own factory for it. Getting the raw material was a whole fucking saga of its own." Tony straightens, moistens his lips, and Bucky senses an extraordinary sequence of events behind that sentence. He imagines the team—the Avengers?—using their abilities to try and locate those ingredients and create that vaccine. It must have been astonishing. He wonders if he’ll ever hear the story.

"We made as much as we could, vaccinated anybody we could. TL;DR," Bucky has no idea what that means, "we’re in the Avengers facility upstate with a bunch of other survivors. Subsistence living, a kind of village. The virus seems to have burned itself out, though we vaccinate anybody we find within seconds, so who knows. National government hasn’t been restored yet, communities are far more localized. Gas is rare so transport is pedal bikes, walking, horses, boats. Our main focus has been getting energy from wind and solar, lotta reverse-engineering components for maintenance and duplication. Nat’s been running incredible communication and search ops, hooking people up with medical and scientific expertise, finding survivors." He looks weary, suddenly old. "There are, uh. Very few."

Bucky sees movement behind Tony. "Steve?" 

Tony brightens, visibly mischievous. "Oh yeah, well, you know I said life is more localized now, organized around communities? Wilson isn’t just Captain America any more. May I present—Mayor Wilson!"

A handsome man swings into the seat beside Tony, grinning. "Shut up, Tony. Steve, man, you’re _alive!_ We had you pegged as dead for sure, Nat’s been trawling Siberia ever since we got the satellite linkup again, but it’s beyond needle in haystack. What went down?"

The simple question makes Steve crack open. "God, Sam. It was hard. I had a run in with Hydra, and then I was, well." He takes a deep breath. "Alone, for five years." Bucky rubs his hand down his back, silent support. "Until Bucky found me," and Bucky’s heart aches again at the thought of Steve’s isolation for so long.

Sam nods, his face glad and grave. "Barnes." Bucky blinks, caught in Sam’s gaze, and is warmed all through. Sam’s eyes are serious, kind, and he feels acknowledged at a profound level."I’m glad you made it, man. I’m sorry for what you went through."

So he knows the file about what Hydra did to him, too. Bucky shifts, ashamed, and Steve swoops in. "Sam, Tony’s explained to us that extraction isn’t feasible, but that you can scan our area, help us locate survivors."

Sam nods efficiently. Bucky can see he’s the leader of the group; authority sits well on him. "We can. We’ll be in touch, say, weekly, help you locate others. We’ll send you some text documents, help you catch up on what’s been happening over here; you can reciprocate. Before we go, though," and Sam leans towards the screen, face grim, and the energy changes. Nat slips back into the seat beside Sam and Tony straightens. Sam speaks directly. "Have you found any trace of Hydra?"

"No. We found—traps," Steve stiffens as he says it, "but no sign of Hydra survivors."

Sam nods, sombre. "They were definitely involved in the bioweapon. We increasingly suspect SHIELD and Hydra might have had overlap."

Steve sits bolt upright. "But Peggy made SHIELD! And Howard!"

"Yeah, and then Zola and co. may have _un-_ made it. We’ll probably never know for sure, but the electronic trail we have found looks disturbing. Let’s not even start on Alexander Pierce. We even," Sam hesitates, looks at Bucky, and his next comments are directed solely to him.

"Barnes, we found evidence that for a while in the 1990s there were plans to deploy you as the Winter Soldier on American soil. It was going to have something to do with Howard Stark, and with getting new versions of the serum. In the end they didn’t send you, we don’t know why, but they considered sending you over here again in 2015, with Pierce as your handler. It looks like those plans fell through at the last minute. We aren’t sure what they wanted you to do over here either time, and since Peggy and Howard both died the year before the virus we couldn’t get any clues from them either."

Steve’s grip around Bucky tightens to near pain. Bucky doesn’t know what to say, but he nods. "Thank you." It’s thanks not only for the information but for the dignity Sam implicitly gives him, addressing him directly and by name. He’d follow this man, he realizes. This is a leader he would work for—not out of fear, but with respect and joy.

Steve’s speaking urgently now, "Sam, one last thing. Do you have vines? Blood red vines?"

Sam looks startled. "Like, plants?"

"I somehow doubt he means the candy." Nat’s wry.

"Bucky," Steve speaks urgently, and Bucky jumps up willingly, rushes out of the cabin. When he gets back inside Steve’s explaining about how the vines seem to gather around places with living things and how animals instinctively seek them out as a kind of protection. Steve grabs them from Bucky’s hand, holds them up to the screen.

The team look fascinated, and Tony’s already clearly photographing them, muttering. "Dammit, my kingdom for a courier service."

"Another reason to try and get the fuel. This is interesting! Thanks. But for now—stay safe. We’ll speak in a week, same time. We’ll have survivor data for you." Sam’s closing smile is warm and when Steve salutes it widens into a grin.

* * *

  
  


"So. Survivors, huh?"

It’s a bit later. They’ve eaten (smoked fish today, from Bucky’s winter stores) and are resting on the couch in front of the fire under a blanket. Steve’s arms are around him and his head is on Steve’s broad chest.

Bucky nods, the idea of it uncurling warm and welcome in his mind. "If they find any, and if we make contact, some might like to come live by the Teletskoye, too? Lots of cabins, privacy and distance but maybe safer to have people together." He thinks of it. There’s fish and game, the forest has fuel and plants for foraging and the sheer outrageous bounty of pine and birch. He could maybe—even share some of his skills? Help people? "We can—look out for each other." 

The sharp pain-pleasure of saying it takes him by surprise. He can’t hold back a sob.

"Hey, hey, Buck, what’s up?" Steve tilts his head up, a gentle finger under his chin. Bucky looks up into concerned blue eyes.

He says, slowly, "Something happened about a year ago, when I was hiking from the northern base. I came across a village by the Reka Vitim. It had been evacuated in a hurry and there was this kitchen—you could tell a big meeting had happened there. It had maps, plans. And I felt—I was so sad, Steve." Bucky doesn’t flinch from his gaze, swallows against the lump of distress in his throat. Steve’s listening, all his laser focus on Bucky. "I was so sad, because I knew even if I had been there, able to help, they wouldn’t have _wanted_ me to help, I was too—weird, too dangerous. But now," and Bucky bites his lip. "Maybe I can help people who survived. I can be useful."

Steve’s answering smile is tender and he trails one finger down Bucky’s cheek, smudges his thumb across his cheekbone. Bucky closes his eyes and turns his head into the gentle touch. The cozy cabin and Steve’s hands are making a spell around him, a healing bubble. They will keep holding each other, healing each other—and perhaps, one day, they can help other survivors, too.

  
  


* * *

Later, they’re out foraging before it gets dark. They’re both quiet, still processing everything that happened on the call, but Bucky can’t stop smiling, even breaking out in laughter. Steve grins at him, eyebrow arched, and Bucky stops walking. "Steve!"

He can see his own smile reflected in Steve’s expression changing, echoing his wonder. "We’re not alone. We’re not _alone_."

Bucky can feel his new confidence shining out of him, shining like gold. This isn’t the end. It’s not just them anymore.

* * *

"I’ve been thinking about the vines."

Steve looks up from the book he’s reading, an English-language history of the Altai that Bucky scavenged from one of the northern cabins. "Yeah?"

"Look." He shows Steve the book he’s been rifling through. "This is flora of the region. See that?"

Steve peers. "Huh. I see what you mean." It’s green but it otherwise resembles, on a smaller scale, the blood vines. "You think it’s specific to here?"

"Well, I mean, they’re all over Siberia, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all across the Eurasia landmass. And they look a bit like seaweed I saw by the Sea of Okhotsk. The thing is, though," and he knows his eyes are bright with enthusiasm from the fond way Steve’s looking at him, "it shows they were always here. Do you see?"

Steve looks perplexed but intrigued, and Bucky tries to explain more. "They aren’t—alien, or weird, or like, unnatural. They're just here. They've _always_ been here. And it made me think, well."

Those blue eyes are on him now. "What do you mean, Buck?"

Bucky hesitates. "I mean. There have been stories about the taiga for a long time. I sometimes wonder, you know?"

"Wonder what?"

Bucky doesn’t reply straight away. His gaze has fallen on Wolf. Her intelligent blue eyes are on him, and she’s very still.

She stands up, lifts her muzzle. She doesn't look away from Bucky.

"Bucky?"

Bucky’s still staring at her, and his reply to Steve is soft. "I wonder whether there’s maybe some stuff humans never knew. Maybe there was always something else here. Something before us."

Wolf barks. Her blue eyes are shining, and Bucky stands, moves to her, kneels by her. "Like your blue eyes, pal. Why blue? It must be a mutation—" He leans, strokes the ruff at her neck. “How did you know who Steve was, where Steve was? How did you know I needed to find him?” His voice is soft, still awed by the sheer impossibility of it all.

She doesn’t reply, just gazes at him, but he thinks she looks amused.

He isn’t going to find an answer to those last mysteries, then. There’s so much humans don’t understand, but that’s okay. Humans thinking they understand things hasn’t worked out well for the planet so far. A bit of humility is probably in order, and that thought reminds him of another poem. He glances back at Steve, who hasn’t looked away from him, his blue eyes intent. “I want to read you something." 

He finds what he’s looking for easily. It’s the collection by Nikolas Roerich that had meant so much to him in those months before he found Steve, but this time he reaches for a different poem, and when he reads it he hears his own voice ring out, strong. 

These are words of hope. Recovery. And both of them can find it.

_"We live again._

_And again we shall change._

_And again_

_We shall touch the earth."_

Steve can’t speak, but he reaches out to take Bucky’s hand. His cheeks are wet but his eyes are blue and open and Bucky understands.

* * *

“What was it like?”

They’re lying together in bed, rain on the windows. They’re naked under the blankets, relaxed and lanquid after sex that was anything but. Bucky’s whole body feels heavy and peaceful. His arm is thrown over Steve’s chest and he has his head on the pillow, watching Steve’s profile.

Steve’s eyes are closed, but at Bucky’s question he opens them, turns his head just enough. He looks more peaceful than Bucky ever remembers seeing him in the pre-war years of fight and spikiness. “What’s what like, Bucky?”

Bucky shifts, pushes himself up on one elbow. It’s maybe odd to ask this now, but he’s been wondering. “The vines. Being wrapped in them.

Steve doesn’t seem disturbed by the question, tilts his head. “It was … light. Like being wrapped in light. It went .. deep, it was warm.” he frowns, shakes his head, then looks back at Bucky with a rueful smile. “I can’t explain it.” 

Bucky bites his own lower lip. There’s an idea bubbling that he can’t shake. “It helped you. It brought you back from the words.” 

Steve’s gaze sharpens, and he shifts onto his elbow too, facing Bucky. “You’re thinking you should go into the vines.” 

Does he? Is that what this restlessness means? It makes sense, after all. Bucky has the words too. Maybe this is like—an antidote. Maybe he needs the healing too. 

He glances towards the window of the cabin, where vines partially obscure the window. Sun shines red through them. They’re everywhere, and they’re a gift. Bucky needs to know them. “I think I do.” He says it slowly, but with the words comes a sureness, a certainty unfolding deep in his chest. He looks back at Steve, and Steve’s expression is pure love and steadfastness.

Steve says, simply, “Then we’ll go.” 

* * *

“Are you ready?”

Bucky’s tense at the edge of the radiant light pouring up from the thick vines across the valley floor. They’re back at the astonishing lake, the one he and Wolf saw soon after Baikal. Above them the colours and strength swirl in a silent dance so beautiful that his heart soars just from watching it. But he’s not here to watch. He’s here to go into it.

“Yes.”

He’s not alone. Steve’s with him, and Wolf. Steve reaches one hand out to him, and Bucky takes it, feels Wolf come up beside him, her fur warm under his other hand.

Together, they walk into the light.

The light gets—louder, and yes, that’s the right word, because it’s visual but it’s a kind of … glorious, sonic storm, it’s a vibration, and now he’s in it, they’re all in it, the three of them, and the others are warm against his hands, moving together into the light, into the _song_ of it. They're surrounded and it’s joy, the green blue glory, the strangeness—but it’s not strange. Bucky laughs, his own laughter bursting out as an astonished shining thing.

It’s not strange. It’s something that loves them.

He never needed to be afraid. 

* * *

  
  
_Four months later_

Bucky lies under the trees with his head in Steve’s lap. It’s springtime in the Altai and they’ve climbed up to the yellow poppy meadows on the slopes. A little distance away he can hear the voices of some of the others who have settled near the lake, gathering flowers for seeds for flour. They aren’t alone any more.

His eyes are closed and Steve’s running his fingers through his hair. His limbs are heavy and relaxed.

Finding survivors wasn’t easy. Natasha found some with satellite searches, and Steve and Bucky hiked to the sites. They offered maps to show the way to Teletskoye—the cabins have lots of maps, after all, being a tourist venue, and cartography helped overcome the language barrier. His Russian and Turkish have been useful, and Steve’s been picking up a little of both.

The first person they found was Hiranur, an Altaic woman in her sixties living in defiant resilience higher up the slopes. She definitely didn’t need rescuing—if anything, she’s rescued _them_ , showing them traditional practices of the Altai. Her expertise has been invaluable and she’s been an excellent—if impatient—teacher. He's learned a lot from her already, the language and secrets of plant and terrain. "You’ve not done badly," she tells him. "But you could do better." And he grins.

To his deep joy he can teach, too, and he and Steve can use their strength to help people. The last months have been a flurry of activity, repairing cabins for new arrivals, even a family with two kids. Bucky is shy of them, but three weeks after arriving the twelve year old boy in the family threw a snowball at him and he felt nothing but glee when he used his weaponized Hydra prosthetic to retaliate.

Even Wolf has a new community. Nat found signs of a wolf pack around the forests on the other side of Mount Bekhal and Wolf heads out that way often, even if she does keep returning to their pack, their trio. He's so glad for her. She deserves so many friends. She saved him, and she saved Steve. They will always be a family.

He feels Steve kiss his head. "You’re smiling."

Bucky opens his eyes and sees Steve looking down at him tenderly. The new arrivals have been so good for Steve, too—the long years of isolation are melting away, and his confidence and steel are back. Leaves rustle behind Steve’s head and spring sunlight makes his hair golden. All around them rises the fragrance of poppies.

Maybe one day they will go back to America. See Steve’s team, walk on the streets of New York. Make a new life there. It’s too early to say what is possible. But what Bucky knows, knows _deeply_ , is that this will always also be a place precious to them. It is where they healed, where they found each other. They haven’t just survived war. They’ve survived aftermath.

The trees arch over them like a cathedral, and Bucky remembers the Arctic bunker, that hollow dark span of metal and concrete underground, soaked with death and pain. He hadn’t had mercy for a long time.

He smiles. He has mercy now.

The trees cast dappled light over them as he rests in Steve’s arms, Wolf beside them. They’re home.

  
  


F I N

* * *


	16. Altai Dreams (photographs)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darling people-still-subscribed to "Two Colors, White and Gold" -- I have lovely news! The wonderful resurcat and [avadakedavra](%E2%80%9D) have taken absolutely beautiful images of the Altai to go along with this fic! I am verklempt!!! I am absolutely over the moon. It is my immense pleasure to share these pictures here in an extra chapter :) Look at that sky!!
> 
> I have created a series for this fic for sequels and ficlets: [The Pine Needle Tea papers!](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914091) \-- credit to Quietnight fot the name :D. Also do see her exquisite podfic which is so searingly lovely I just fall over in emotion! 
> 
> Thank you so much for all the encouraging comments so many of you kind readers have left. I hope that all of you and yours are safe amid our own strange pandemic times.
> 
> Xx  
> Daphneblithe/Carelica

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I loved sharing snowy Bucky with you. I am on Discord too! Hit me up on twitter if you like to talk.
> 
> If you liked this fic and fancy [re-tweeting](https://twitter.com/carelica_/status/1204536801374933000?s=20), I'll always be thrilled!
> 
> I also have a [soft 5k healing & touch fic here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18886027) that might be to taste if you like this one at all, and a sprawling 58k eerie romance fic [Love Among the Ruins](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16929495/chapters/39777129). 
> 
> Stay warm! <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Two Colors: White and Gold](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018629) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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